Chapter 56

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER LVI

But I did not retire. I stood for a few moments looking through the window into the darkness. Then I placed my belongings in my satchel, stole softly out of the room, down the great stairs, opened the great door of the main hallway and walked off the porch on to the gravel road, through the iron gate and into the highway leading to the village. I looked back at Isabel's mansion, at the roof dark between the dark trees. Under that roof the most priceless heart I had found in life was beating--but was it in sleep or in wakefulness? I was numbed, stunned, hopeless. I could never return here, never see Isabel again. The Orphic metamorphosis meant a complete disappearance from her life. She had not turned me away or dismissed me; she had done no cruel thing, said no word that wounded or would grow poignant in memory. She had been in every way an angel of light--and for these reasons I could not see her again. Whatever I was in truth, rid of accidental emotions if such they were, I had filled her mind with fear and doubt. Thus our fate was made, our sorrow was born.

As I walked along in the darkness toward the village, my loneliness in the world came over me. I had not attached many to me; many of those I had won were gone. Was there a home for me? How could I return to the house in Chicago? To what there? I had come from Italy to America; from a city of memories and spiritual richnesses to the tumult of New York. Above all I had found heaven in Isabel and lost it. My life had come to flower only to be withered. I had stepped out of heaven into hell, and from a great light into darkness.

But the soul does not give up while there is breath. If one is ill he looks forward to health; if he is slowly dying he hopes for years of life; if one friend is lost there is another to turn to. No heart so desperate but can imagine a haven, however poor it may be, and go to it.

In this hour my mind turned to Reverdy back in Jacksonville. There could be no truer, kinder heart. There in the prairie of Illinois that I had grown up with he would be my solace. What had I to do with Rome, with art; what with a woman like Isabel? I had ventured on sacred ground and this was my punishment. A god had driven me forth. I had won my heart's desire; but before I could enjoy it a god, ironical but just, intuitive and swift to punish, had sent me down to my place in life. I would go to Reverdy, and stand before him in my familiar guise. He would not see Rome in my eyes; he would not know that I had been in Paradise; that in my heart shone a face that I had put by and should never look on again. Every man is a temple of forsaken shrines, of altars where candles burned replenished by spirits that need open no doors--a temple whose portals are barred.

I went through Chicago, which had grown and changed in my absence so marvelously, straight to Jacksonville, regarding nothing on my way, reading nothing. Like a supernatural being which has girdled the earth in a second, it seemed that I stood before Reverdy and Sarah and their children. I stood before them, but I could hear the bells of Rome; and I saw Isabel as she handed the candle to me and walked from the room.

I supplemented what I had written to them of Dorothy's death; then I told them brokenly of Rome. Where could I begin, what words could I select to express briefly my experiences? But besides, Isabel was all my thought, and of her I could not speak. Then we had the meal. The house, the town, the surrounding country, began to assemble themselves together familiarly. I was back. The old life was slipping on me as one removes his best dress for the overalls of work. Pinturicchio! What light was falling on those soft and tender cheeks in the Vatican? But where was Douglas?

Douglas! Reverdy looked at me as if he had much to say. "He's campaigning," said Reverdy; "already has made about a hundred speeches. He has a fight on his hands. He has a tough rival to handle."

"Who is it?"

"Abraham Lincoln!"

"Who is Abraham Lincoln?"

I had never heard that name before; nor seen it in print. Reverdy went on to tell me briefly that Lincoln had been in the legislature at the same time that Douglas was in 1836; that he had been in Congress in 1847; that he was well known as a lawyer in Springfield; that for many years he had done nothing but practice law, though more active in politics since 1855 than before. That was some explanation of my ignorance of the name.

I repeated it aloud: "Abraham Lincoln. That is a great name," I said to Reverdy. "Well, he's an able lawyer, and he gives Douglas enough to do in the debates they're having." "So they are debating, are they?" I asked. "Yes," drawled Reverdy, "Lincoln was nominated for Senator by the Republicans; Douglas of course is again the nominee of the Democrats. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a debate; and they're at it hot and heavy. We talk of nothing else. It's funny you didn't hear of it anywhere along the way home. This part of the country is on fire, and they say the East is waking up to what is going on here in Illinois. I've got the newspapers here containing all the debates. You've got some good reading ahead of you. To-morrow's the last debate over at Alton."

"We must go," I said quickly. "I wouldn't miss that for the world. We must go." And I was thinking, what better way to forget Isabel? Reverdy was really glad to hear this debate at Alton; but it was necessary for him to attend to some things this day in preparation of being absent to-morrow. In the afternoon he had to drive out to his farm, and I went with him. And when we came within a short distance of the log cabin, where I had spent my first winter on the farm, I was seized with a desire to see it again. There was so much of Rome and Italy fresh in my mind with which to contrast my previous life. And we drove to the cabin.

The door had fallen to one side. The clay between the logs had dried, turned to dust, and fallen away. The roof had sagged. The fireplace was going to wreck. We looked in. Weeds had grown up during the summer through the crevices of the floor. The place was lonely and haunted. "Well," said Reverdy, "this is the kind of a home that Lincoln had as a boy. He was born in a cabin like this; and he's poor now. He has never got rich like Douglas has. And Douglas will soon be as poor as Lincoln if he keeps on at the same rate spending money in this campaign. They say he has mortgaged nearly all his property in Chicago. Everybody's fighting him--the Republicans, all the Abolitionists, and half the Democrats. This campaign means his political death or life."

"You say Lincoln was born in a log cabin. Is this a campaign of the log cabin, hard cider, and war records?"

"Well, perhaps more log cabins, but no war record. Lincoln was never in any war but the Black Hawk. He was against the Mexican War; and when in Congress voted for resolutions that the war was unconstitutional and improper. No, he is not old Harrison or old Zach Taylor. Still the log cabin is in the fight."

Then Reverdy went on to tell me that Lincoln was a clean man and that the Republicans had no abler man in Illinois; that he had been a good deal in politics after all, though quiet for about ten years. That while Douglas had been Senator, chairman of the committee on territories, his name on everybody's tongue, the most prominent man and the most active in the whole country, building railroads, organizing territories, battling with Great Britain, settling California and Oregon, and Kansas and Nebraska, traveling abroad into Russia and Asiatic Europe, and companioning with notables everywhere, making money almost like a millionaire, Lincoln had been over at Springfield practicing law, talking on the street corners, sitting in his office alone in reflection, sometimes reading; but all the while, in a way, resting.

"He's fresh and Douglas is tired," said Reverdy. "He has the advantage of not having committed himself much. Douglas has spoken freely on everything. He's four years older than Douglas, but he's a younger man. He's a temperance man they say; and while I like a drink, I don't like to see a man drink as much as Douglas does. They say he's been pouring it down during this campaign. But as for Douglas' stooping to debate with Lincoln, it's no stoop. They make the fur fly when they talk. What I fear is that there's going to be trouble in this country. I hate slavery, but I hate this agitation too. I don't want to see the North keep on making war on the South. It will breed trouble sure. And this is where I stand with Douglas. He is for non-interference with slavery and his election will be a quieter."

When we got back to Reverdy's house I plunged into the newspapers containing the debates. I read until suppertime, and then late into the night. I read them all. I went to bed and analyzed the arguments.

A house divided against itself cannot stand! This was Seward's irrepressible conflict clothed in Biblical language. The religious revival which had swept the country gave these words a compelling acceptance. But as I read this it came over me that both Jesus and Lincoln were sophists. For a house divided against itself can stand; and irrepressible conflicts rage forever. They may change their ground, but they do not cease. I had seen this in Europe and in Italy, where in the January just past a certain Orsini had attempted the life of Louis Napoleon because he had not acceded to the labors of Cavour and thus hastened the liberty of Italy. And yet Italy was standing and France. Houses are divided everywhere and they stand. Beelzebub is crafty enough to cast out devils here and there in order to confound his kingdom with the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course he does not cast all the devils out--if he did he would lose his kingdom--only enough to make himself appear as one of the divine wonder-workers. A house divided against itself can stand, even as the world can stand with both good and evil in it, with both God and Satan in divided authority over it; and even as man has good and evil in his own nature and still lives and works without becoming wholly good or wholly evil. So could this country stand divided into free and slave states as it was formed at the beginning. There was not the slightest chance that it would ever become all slave, as Lincoln had presented one of the alternatives of a divided house. There was great chance that it would become all free by natural processes, as Douglas had indicated over and over again before the time of these debates.

Here I found that the debaters had split hairs on what the fathers had done. "Why can't these agitators leave the states as they were made by the fathers, slave and free?" asked Douglas. "They were not made," retorted Lincoln, "they were found; slavery was found and was let be as it was." "No," said Douglas, "the fathers organized a republic, adopted a Constitution; and when they made it, instead of abolishing slavery, making it free, they kept slavery and made it slave by the votes of states passing upon and acceding to an instrument of government. And besides, this instrument of government provided for the importation of more slaves from Africa; and provided for the capture and return of fugitive slaves now in the country or thereafter to be imported into the country."

Douglas had attacked the doctrine of a divided house with all possible power and brilliancy. He had insisted that there was no more reason for the house of America to be divided because there was negro slavery in some states and no slavery in others, than because there was prohibition in Maine and whisky in Kentucky. And that there would be disunion if some states warred on other states about the purely domestic affairs of the latter. This was the only sense in which the house could be divided, and caused to fall. That disparate interests in the states should not make hostility between them; and that hostility arising from attacks and agitation should be put down. He went on to denounce the Republican party for holding and preaching a faith that arrayed one section of the country against another; and with great satire and invective he showed that the Republicans stood upon sectional principles which could not be preached in the South and not everywhere in the North. "But now you have a sectional organization," he had said to a theocratic audience at Galesburg, "a party which appeals to the northern section of the Union against the southern, a party which appeals to northern passion, northern pride, northern ambition, and northern prejudices, against southern people, the southern states, and southern institutions. The leaders of that party hope to be able to unite the northern states in one great sectional party; and inasmuch as the North is the strongest section they will thus be enabled to outvote, conquer, and control the South. Is there a Republican in Galesburg who can travel into Kentucky and carry his principles with him across the Ohio?"

Douglas had even shown that Lincoln did not utter the same sentiments in all parts of Illinois. In Chicago where there was a large alien vote Lincoln had said: "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man? If the Declaration is not the truth let us get the statute books in which we find it and tear it out. Who is so bold as to do it?... Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position, discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

Douglas had driven Lincoln hard upon this application of the Declaration of Independence with the result that in the southern part of Illinois, at Charleston, Lincoln had uttered these words of a very different tenor:

"I will say then that I am not nor never have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor never have been in favor of making free voters of the negroes or jurors or qualifying them to hold office or having them marry with white people. I will say in addition that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I suppose will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality; and inasmuch as they cannot so live that while they do remain together there must be the position of the superior and the inferior; that I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white man."

Lincoln and Douglas were therefore at one on this. But how about slavery? Lincoln looked forward to a time when slavery would be abolished. How could that be? By not admitting any more slave states? No! For Lincoln confessed that he would as a Senator vote to admit a slave state, if it as a territory had had a free chance to have slavery or freedom as it chose, and if in becoming a state it freely adopted a slave constitution. As to these opinions Lincoln and Douglas were agreed; for Douglas had fought the Kansas constitution because it forced slavery on Kansas; and now the whole Buchanan administration in Illinois was arrayed against Douglas for his attitude on Kansas, and Lincoln was profiting by that.

How would Lincoln abolish slavery? By starving it, girding it about gradually with freedom, keeping it where it was. That was all. What would Douglas do? Referring to Lincoln's looking forward to a time when slavery would be abolished everywhere Douglas said: "I look forward to a time when each state shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is not my business but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business not mine. I care more for the great principles of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom. I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Constitution, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed."

What would Lincoln do about the fugitive-slave law? Douglas had denounced attempts to evade it and actual violations of it. Even the Whigs frowned on its nullification. What would Lincoln do? He was not in favor of its repeal. He had said at Freeport: "I think under the Constitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional fugitive-slave law.... As we are now in no agitation in regard to an alteration or modification of that law, I would not be the man to introduce it as a new subject of agitation upon the general question of slavery."

For the rest, what did it all come to? Like two pugilists Lincoln and Douglas blocked each other's blows, drove each other into corners. Lincoln twitted Douglas about being on both sides of the matter of extending the Missouri Compromise. Then Douglas tripped Lincoln, who had asserted that only slavery had ever disturbed the peace of the Union. "How about the War of 1812, and the Hartford convention?" asked Douglas. How about the tariff and South Carolina in 1832? He might have asked, how about the Alien and Sedition laws and the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. But for the rest, what did it all come to?

Lincoln contended that Congress had the power to forbid slavery in the territories; Douglas worked up from a position, which scarcely denied the power, but rather shrank from its use, to the position that sovereignty abode in the people of the territory; and that as Congress has no express grant of power to legislate upon slavery as to a territory, the territorial sovereignty had the only power to do so. He attacked Lincoln's position that a territory is a creature of Congress as a property, to be clothed with powers or denied powers; and particularly with powers not possessed by Congress itself. This doctrine led to imperialism. Douglas held that Congress had the power to organize territories under the clause providing for the admission of new states; but when they were organized they assumed an organic sovereignty out of an inchoate sovereignty, and had the right to legislate as they chose to the same extent as a state. It was the old fight between implied powers and strict construction.

What in the Constitution forbade slaves from being taken into the territories? Not a thing. Moreover the territories were the commons of all the states, won by their common valor and blood. Could not a liquor dealer from Chicago take his stock to Kansas? Assuredly. Why then could not a planter from Louisiana take his slaves to Nebraska? Liquor and slaves were property. Who said so? The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution, and the fugitive-slave law of 1850 which Lincoln admitted he would not alter.

But after the liquor was in Kansas or the slave in Nebraska could they flourish? That depended on the territorial law, the attitude of the people. Did Congress have to pass favorable legislation? From what clause flowed the duty and the power? Did a territorial legislature have power to pass favorable legislation? It was not called upon to do so by anything in the Federal Constitution. Therefore, the mere right to take a slave into free territory under the Dred Scott decision, take it as property, was a naked right without local support. "This popular sovereignty is as thin as soup made from the shadow of a starved pigeon," said Lincoln. Nevertheless, it was what it was and no more. And Lincoln's catch question on the legal right to keep slavery out of the territories did not catch Douglas. The mere right to take a slave into free territory could coexist with no protective legislation after the slave was there. It could coexist with unfavorable legislation and social opposition. Let natural processes rule.

What was the difference between this and girding the slave states around with freedom? That could scarcely be done without the aid of natural processes.

But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory, the South was drawing away from him. He was not their friend to the extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a slave against the will of the territory. Was Douglas unmoral? What of the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too? Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.

Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished. The next morning Reverdy and I started for Alton.

I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln. _

Read next: Chapter 57

Read previous: Chapter 55

Table of content of Children of the Market Place


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book