This Week in History: The Lincoln-Douglas debates
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
Aug. 21, 1858, brought the first of the famous three-hour long debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
Agreeing to seven public debates throughout the state of Illinois, these two men might have only been vying for a U.S. Senate seat, but the topics touched on during their encounters were ones being asked throughout the country.
The debates themselves centered on the question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand into U.S. territories – a burning question in light of the new territories popping up west of the Missouri River.
Douglas, the incumbent, had authored the famous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the ban on slavery in territories north of 36˚30’ latitude.
In place of the outright ban, Douglas’ bill offered popular sovereignty, a doctrine that allowed the actual settlers of the territories to vote on whether slavery be allowed in their territory.
This bill set off a flurry of migrants to Kansas and Nebraska, ideological immigrants who travelled to the territories to secure a vote one way or the other.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act also spurred the creation of the Republican Party, which formed largely to keep slavery out of the western territories.
When Lincoln received the Republican Party’s nomination to run against Douglas, he said in his acceptance speech that “A house divided cannot stand” and that “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Bold words in face of an opponent who literally wrote the opposing doctrine.
Recognizing the significance of the upcoming debates, newspapers across the country sent reporters to Illinois in droves.
The first of the debates was to be held in Ottawa, Illinois. The rules had already been agreed to by both candidates.
In each debate, either Lincoln or Douglas would open with an hour-long address. The other would speak for an hour and a half. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal.
As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first that August afternoon. When he stepped up to the podium, he faced between 10,000 and 12,000 onlookers, who had crowded to the scene of the debate hours before it had started.
In his opening speech, Douglas began a line of attack he maintained for the rest of the seven debates. Lincoln, Douglas argued, was a radical abolitionist whose extremist ideas would undermine the stability of the country.
When Lincoln stepped up after Douglas’ initial address, he was met with a protracted cheer from fully two-thirds of those in attendance – this was Lincoln territory and the audience let him know it.
After waiting for the crowd to die down, Lincoln spent much of his time defending against the absurd charges brought against him. Towards the end of his hour and a half address, Lincoln laid out what would become the moral foundation of his argument against slavery:
“Now … one more word and I am done. Henry Clay … once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our Independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country!”
At this, the crowd erupted in wild cheers. Ottawa definitely was for Lincoln.
Over the course of the next two months, the two opponents faced each other time and again. During his final debate, Lincoln distilled the essence of the confrontation between himself and Senator Douglas:
“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. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Although he would go on to lose to Douglas in the senatorial election, the seven debates he had with Stephen Douglas in the fall of 1858 set Abraham Lincoln onto the national stage and well on his way to the White House.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.