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US History Encyclopedia: Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Lincoln-Douglas Debates, seven joint debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas during the 1858 senatorial election campaign in Illinois. The debates marked the culmination of a political rivalry that had its origin twenty-five years before, when both were aspiring politicians in the Illinois legislature. Their careers had followed divergent tracks in the political culture of nineteenth-century America—Lincoln, the Henry Clay Whig espousing a broad program of national centralization and authority and distrustful of the new mass democracy, and Douglas, the Andrew Jackson Democrat standing for local self-government and states' rights, with an abiding faith in the popular will. By 1858, both had become deeply involved in the sectional conflict between the slave and free states over the status of slavery in the creation of western territories and the admission of new states. Douglas, seeking reelection to a third term in the U.S. Senate, had fifteen years of national experience and notoriety behind him and was widely known for his role in the passage of the Compromise of 1850 and his authorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Lincoln, a spokesman for the new antislavery Republican Party, whose experience save for one term in the House of Representatives had been limited to several terms in the Illinois legislature, was virtually unknown outside the boundaries of the state.

From the beginning, the campaign assumed national significance. Douglas, with Republican support, was at that moment leading the opposition in Congress to the southern effort to admit Kansas as a slave state under the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution. To the southern slave power and its ally in the White House, President James Buchanan, Douglas's defeat for reelection was essential to the extension of slavery, a cause recently given constitutional sanction by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision. At the same time, influential Republican leaders in the eastern states regarded Douglas's reelection as necessary to the success of their effort to keep slavery from expanding into new territories. Because the stakes were high, the contest between Douglas and Lincoln attracted widespread attention.

Lincoln opened the campaign in Springfield, the state capital, on 16 June 1858, when he delivered what has been hailed as the most important statement of his career, the "House Divided" speech. It was a strident call for Republican unity against what he described as a slave power conspiracy, of which Douglas was the principal conspirator, to extend slavery throughout the territories and free states of the Union. Moving away from his earlier conservative position, opposing the extension of slavery while tolerating it in the states where it already existed, Lincoln assumed a more radical stance. The conflict between freedom and slavery, he argued, was irrepressible and incapable of compromise, and would not cease until slavery should be placed in the course of "ultimate extinction," an abolitionist argument in everything but name. "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Douglas returned to Illinois from his Senate seat in Washington, where he had been leading the fight against the Lecompton Constitution, and on 9 July, in Chicago, he opened his campaign for reelection. In defense of his role in the struggle to keep slavery out of Kansas, Douglas cited the "great principle of self-government" upon which he had based his political beliefs, "the right of the people in each State and Territory to decide for themselves their domestic institutions" (including slavery), or what he called popular sovereignty.

Lincoln's House Divided speech and Douglas's Chicago speech provided the themes and arguments for the debates that followed. Seven joint debates were agreed upon, one in each of the state's congressional districts except the two in which the candidates had already spoken. Beginning in late August and extending to the middle of October, debates were scheduled in Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton. Thousands of spectators flocked to the debate sites to hear the candidates, railroads offered special excursion tickets, and the pageantry of election campaigns was provided by parades, brass bands, and glee clubs. On the platforms, Lincoln and Douglas offered a striking contrast, Lincoln standing six feet four inches tall, with patient humility, serious and persuasive, and Douglas a foot shorter at five feet four inches, animated, bold, and defiant. Rarely, if ever, had two candidates for the position of U.S. senator taken their arguments directly to the people, for senators were elected by the state legislatures until 1913.

The debates elicited little that was new and unexpected. Each spent considerable time in accusations and denials, typical of nineteenth-century stump speaking, their arguments often ambiguous and inconsistent. Lincoln repeated his conspiracy charge against Douglas, while at the same time dramatizing the split between Douglas and the South on the Lecompton issue. When he pointed out the inconsistency of Douglas's popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision, Douglas responded with what became known as the Freeport Doctrine, the right of a territory to exclude slavery by "unfriendly legislation" regardless of what the Supreme Court might decide. When Douglas charged Lincoln with harboring views of racial equality, Lincoln replied with emphatic denials. For Lincoln, slavery was a moral, social, and political evil, a position he reinforced with an appeal to the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence. The contest was but part of the eternal struggle between right and wrong that would not cease until the evil—slavery—was restricted and placed on the path toward extinction. Douglas found a dangerous radicalism in Lincoln's stand that would lead to disunion and a disastrous sectional war. Only by treating slavery as a matter of public policy, to be decided by the right of every community to decide the question for itself, could the Union be saved.

On 2 November 1858, Illinois voters gave the Democrats a legislative majority, which in turn elected Douglas to a third term in the Senate. Lincoln, although defeated, won recognition throughout the North that by 1860 placed him on the path to the presidency. Douglas, in winning reelection, alienated the South and weakened his power in the Senate. The debates—the specter of Lincoln's "ultimate extinction" of slavery and Douglas's threat to slavery's expansion in the territories—intensified the conflict between the slaveholding states and the free states of the North, placing the cherished Union itself in jeopardy. Douglas's worst fears were about to be realized.

Bibliography

Angle, Paul M., ed. Created Equal: The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Wikipedia: Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat, for an Illinois seat in the United States Senate. At the time, U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were campaigning for their respective parties to win control of the legislature. The debates presaged the issues that Lincoln faced in the 1860 Presidential campaign and are remembered partially for the eloquence of both sides. The main issue discussed in all seven debates was slavery.

In agreeing to the debates, Lincoln and Douglas wanted to hold one debate in each of the nine Congressional Districts in Illinois. Since both had already spoken in two -- Springfield and Chicago -- within a day of each other, they decided that their "joint appearances" would be held only in the remaining seven districts.

The debates were held in seven towns in the state of Illinois:

Ottawa on August 21,
Freeport on August 27,
Jonesboro on September 15,
Charleston on September 18,
Galesburg on October 7,
Quincy on October 13, and
Alton on October 15.

The debates in Freeport, Quincy and Alton drew especially large numbers of attendees from neighboring states, as the issue of slavery was of monumental importance to citizens across the nation.^[1]^[2] Newspaper coverage of the debates was intense, as major papers from Chicago sent stenographers to create complete texts of each debate. Then newspapers across the nation reprinted the full text of the debates as published by the Chicago papers. Interestingly, newspapers that supported Douglas edited his speeches to remove any errors made by the stenographers and to correct grammatical errors, while they left Lincoln's speeches in the rough form in which they had been transcribed. In the same way, Republican papers edited Lincoln's speeches, but left the Douglas texts as reported.

After the election for Senator in Illinois, Lincoln edited the texts of all the debates and had them published in a book. The wide-spread coverage of the original debates and the subsequent popularity of the book led eventually to Lincoln's nomination for President of the United States by the Republican Party meeting in convention in Chicago in 1860.

Each debate had this format: one candidate spoke for an hour, then the other candidate spoke for an hour and a half, and then the first candidate was allowed a half hour "rejoinder." The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates.

Prelude

Daguerreotype of Lincoln c. 1846

Before the debates, Lincoln said that Douglas was encouraging fears of amalgamation of the races with enough success to drive thousands of people away from the Republican Party.^[3] Douglas tried to convince, especially the Democrats, that Lincoln was an abolitionist for saying that the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks as well as whites. Lincoln called a self-evident truth "the electric cord ... that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together."

Lincoln argued in his House Divided Speech that Douglas was part of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery. Lincoln said that ending the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in Kansas and Nebraska was the first step in this direction, and that the Dred Scott decision was another step in the direction of spreading slavery into Northern states and territories. Lincoln expressed the fear that the next Dred Scott decision would make Illinois a slave state.^[4]

Both Lincoln and Douglas had opposition. Although Lincoln was a former Whig, the prominent former Whig Judge Theophilus Lyle Dickey said that Lincoln was too closely tied to the abolitionists, and supported Douglas. But Democratic President James Buchanan opposed Douglas for defeating the Lecompton Constitution, and set up a rival National Democratic party that drew votes away from Douglas.^[5]

Lincoln and Douglas each exaggerated the extremism of his opponent. Lincoln was more moderate than the abolitionists, and Douglas defeated a southern attempt to use vote fraud to have Kansas admitted as a slave state.

The debates

Stephen A. Douglas

The main theme of the debates was slavery, especially the issue of slavery expansion into the territories. It was Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and replaced it with the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, which meant that the people of a territory could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Lincoln said that Popular Sovereignty would nationalize and perpetuate slavery.^[6]^[7] Douglas argued that both Whigs and Democrats believed in popular sovereignty, and that the Compromise of 1850 was an example of this. Lincoln said that the national policy was to limit the spread of slavery starting with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery from a large part of the modern-day Midwest. Lincoln pointed out that the Compromise of 1850 was just that, a compromise. It allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for or against slavery, but it also allowed the admission of California as a free state, reduced the size of the slave state of Texas by adjusting the boundary, and ended the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. In return, the South got a stronger fugitive slave law than the version mentioned in the Constitution. Whereas Douglas said that the Compromise of 1850 replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri, Lincoln said that this was not true, and that the compromises that allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide on slavery applied only to the specific issues decided as part of the Compromise of 1850.

There were partisan remarks, such as Douglas' accusations that members of the "Black Republican" party, such as Lincoln, were abolitionists. Douglas cited as proof Lincoln's House Divided speech in which he said, " I believe this government cannot endure permanently half Slave and half Free."

Douglas also charged Lincoln with opposing the Dred Scott decision because "it deprives the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship." Lincoln responded that "the next Dred Scott decision" could allow slavery to spread into free states. Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting to overthrow state laws that excluded blacks from states such as Illinois, which were popular with the northern Democrats, and said, "I believe this Government was made on the white basis," and said that states (including Illinois) should be allowed to exclude "inferior races." Lincoln did not argue for complete social equality. However, he did say Douglas ignored the basic humanity of blacks, and that slaves did have an equal right to liberty. As Lincoln said,

“

I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

”

As Lincoln said,

“

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty-criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

”

Lincoln said he himself didn't know how emancipation should happen. He believed in colonization, but admitted that this was impractical. Without colonization he said that it would be wrong for emancipated slaves to be treated as "underlings," but that there was a large opposition to social and political equality, and that "a universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded." Lincoln said that Douglas' public indifference to slavery would result in slavery expansion because it would mould public sentiment to accept slavery. As Lincoln said,

“

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

”

Lincoln said Douglas "cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up," and that, in the words of Henry Clay, he would "blow out the moral lights around us" and eradicate the love of liberty.

At the debate at Freeport^[8] Lincoln forced Douglas to choose between two options, either of which would damage Douglas' popularity and chances of getting reelected. Lincoln asked Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. Douglas responded that the people of a territory could keep slavery out even though the Supreme Court said that the federal government had no authority to exclude slavery, simply by refusing to pass a slave code and other legislation needed to protect slavery. Douglas alienated Southerners with this Freeport Doctrine, which damaged his chances of winning the Presidency in 1860. In splitting what was the majority political party in 1858 [the Democratic Party], Southerners guaranteed the election of Lincoln, the nominee of the newly formed Republican Party.

Before the debate at Charleston, Democrats held up a banner that read "Negro equality" with a picture of a white man, a negro woman and a mulatto child.^[9] At this debate^[10] Lincoln went further than before in denying the charge that he was an abolitionist, saying that:

“

I am not, nor ever 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 ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ... I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.

”

While denying abolitionist tendencies was effective politics, the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass remarked on Lincoln's "entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race."^[11] In spite of Lincoln's denial of abolitionist tendencies, Stephen Douglas charged Lincoln with having an ally in Frederick Douglass in preaching "abolition doctrines." Stephen Douglas said that "the negro" Frederick Douglass told "all the friends of negro equality and negro citizenship to rally as one man around Abraham Lincoln." Stephen Douglas also charged Lincoln with a lack of consistency when speaking on the issue of racial equality,^[12] and cited Lincoln's previous statements that the declaration that all men are created equal applies to blacks as well as whites.

Lincoln said that slavery expansion endangered the Union, and mentioned the controversies caused by it in Missouri in 1820, in the territories conquered from Mexico that led to the Compromise of 1850, and again with the Bleeding Kansas controversy over slavery. Lincoln said that the crisis would be reached and passed when slavery was put "in the course of ultimate extinction."

At Galesburg^[13] Douglas sought again to prove that Lincoln was an abolitionist with the following quotes from Lincoln:

“

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 that declaration is not the truth, let us get this statute book in which we find it and tear it out.

”

“

Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man-this race and that 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.

”

At Alton^[14] Lincoln tried to reconcile his statements on equality. He said that the authors of the Declaration of Independence:

“

intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ... They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, every where.

”

Lincoln contrasted his support for the Declaration with opposing statements made by the Southern politician John C. Calhoun and Senator John Pettit of Indiana, who called the Declaration "a self-evident lie." Lincoln said that Justice Roger Taney (in his Dred Scott decision) and Stephen Douglas were opposing Thomas Jefferson's self-evident truth, dehumanizing blacks and preparing the public mind to think of them as only property. Lincoln thought slavery had to be treated as a wrong, and kept from growing. As Lincoln said:

“

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. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

”

Lincoln used a number of colorful phrases in the debates, such as when he said that one argument by Douglas made a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse, and compared an evasion by Douglas to the sepia cloud from a cuttlefish. Lincoln said that Douglas' Freeport Doctrine was a do-nothing sovereignty that was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death."^[15]

Results

In the state election, the Democrats won a narrow majority of seats in the Illinois General Assembly, despite getting slightly less than half the votes. The legislature then re-elected Douglas. The Lincoln-Douglas debate format that is used in high school and college competition today is named after this series of debates. Modern presidential debates trace their roots to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, though the format today is remarkably different from the original.

Notes

^ Nevins, Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852, page 163 - "As the fifties wore on, an exhaustive, exacerbating and essentially futile conflict over slavery raged to the exclusion of nearly all other topics."
^ Abraham Lincoln, Speech at New Haven, Conn., March 6, 1860 - "This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."
^ Abraham Lincoln, Notes for Speech at Chicago, February 28, 1857
^ David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, pages 206-210
^ David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, pages 212-213
^ Debate at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858
^ Debate at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858
^ Debate at Freeport, Illinois, August 27, 1858
^ David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, pages 220
^ Debate at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
^ David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, page 221
^ Charleston debate - Douglas said, "Their principles in the north are jet-black, in the center they are in color a decent mulatto, and in lower Egypt they are almost white. Why, I admired many of the white sentiments contained in Lincoln's speech at Jonesboro, and could not help but contrast them with the speeches of the same distinguished orator made in the northern part of the State."
^ Debate at Galesburg, Illinois, October 7, 1858
^ Debate at Alton, Illinois, October 15, 1858
^ Debate at Quincy, Illinois, October 13, 1858

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Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Prelude

The debates

Results

Notes

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