The consciousness that he was made to seem morally obtuse, cut Douglas to the quick. Even upon his tough constitution this prolonged campaign was beginning to tell. His voice was harsh and broken; and he gave unmistakable signs of nervous irritability, brought on by physical fatigue. When he rose to reply to Lincoln, his manner was offensively combative. At the outset, he referred angrily to Lincoln's "gross personalities and base insinuations."[[761]] In his references to the Springfield resolutions and to his mistake, or rather the mistake of his friends at the capital, he was particularly denunciatory. "When I make a mistake," he boasted, "as an honest man, I correct it without being asked to, but when he, Lincoln, makes a false charge, he sticks to it and never corrects it."[[762]]
But Douglas was too old a campaigner to lose control of himself, and no doubt the rude charge and counter-charge were prompted less by personal ill-will than by controversial exigencies. Those who have conceived Douglas as the victim of deep-seated and abiding resentment toward Lincoln, forget the impulsive nature of the man. There is not the slightest evidence that Lincoln took these blows to heart. He had himself dealt many a vigorous blow in times past. It was part of the game.
Douglas found fault with Lincoln's answers to the Ottawa questions: "I ask you again, Lincoln, will you vote to admit New Mexico, when she has the requisite population with such a constitution as her people adopt, either recognizing slavery or not, as they shall determine!" He was well within the truth when he asserted that Lincoln's answer had been purposely evasive and equivocal, "having no reference to any territory now in existence."[[763]] Of Lincoln's Republican policy of confining slavery within its present limits, by prohibiting it in the Territories, he said, "When he gets it thus confined, and surrounded, so that it cannot spread, the natural laws of increase will go on until the negroes will be so plenty that they cannot live on the soil. He will hem them in until starvation seizes them, and by starving them to death, he will put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction."[[764]] A silly argument which Douglas's wide acquaintance with Southern conditions flatly contradicted and should have kept him from repeating.
To the charge of moral obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply. "I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity, and not to us. It is for them to decide, therefore, the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits."[[765]]
On the following day both Lincoln and Douglas took passage on a river steamer for Alton. The county of Madison had once been Whig in its political proclivities. In the State legislature it was now represented by two representatives and a senator who were Native Americans; and in the present campaign, the county was classed as doubtful. In Alton and elsewhere there was a large German vote which was likely to sway the election.
Douglas labored under a physical disadvantage. His voice was painful to hear, while Lincoln's betrayed no sign of fatigue.[[766]] Both fell into the argument ad hominem. Lincoln advocated holding the Territories open to "free white people" the world over—to "Hans, Baptiste, and Patrick." Douglas contended that the equality referred to in the Declaration of Independence, was the equality of white men—"men of European birth and European descent." Both conjured with the revered name of Clay. Douglas persistently referred to Lincoln as an Abolitionist, knowing that his auditors had "strong sympathies southward," as Lincoln shrewdly guessed; while Lincoln sought to unmask that "false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about."[[767]]
Douglas made a successful appeal to the sympathy of the crowd, when he said of his conduct in the Lecompton fight, "Most of the men who denounced my course on the Lecompton question objected to it, not because I was not right, but because they thought it expedient at that time, for the sake of keeping the party together, to do wrong. I never knew the Democratic party to violate any one of its principles, out of policy or expediency, that it did not pay the debt with sorrow. There is no safety or success for our party unless we always do right, and trust the consequences to God and the people. I chose not to depart from principle for the sake of expediency on the Lecompton question, and I never intend to do it on that or any other question."[[768]]
Both at Quincy and at Alton, Douglas paid his respects to the "contemptible crew" who were trying to break up the party and defeat him. At first he had avoided direct attacks upon the administration; but the relentless persecution of the Washington Union made him restive. Lincoln derived great satisfaction from this intestine warfare in the Democratic camp. "Go it, husband! Go it, bear!" he cried.
In this last debate, both sought to summarize the issues. Said Lincoln, "You may turn over everything in the Democratic policy from beginning to end, ... it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything wrong in it [slavery].
"That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.... I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here, to Judge Douglas,—that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery. That will help the people to see where the struggle really is."[[769]]