The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Summary

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the seven joint debates held between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, during the 1858 contest for a United States Senate seat from Illinois. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so the two men were campaigning for legislative candidates of their parties. They met at Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Each debate ran three hours: the opening speaker had an hour, the other replied for an hour and a half, and the first closed with a half-hour rejoinder. Douglas opened four times and Lincoln three. The single great subject was slavery in the federal territories. Douglas defended popular sovereignty, the principle of his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, that the people of each territory and state should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery, and he asked why the Union could not continue half slave and half free as the founders had left it. He charged that Lincoln's House Divided speech of June 1858 invited sectional war and that Lincoln's party meant to make the races politically equal. Lincoln answered that the founders had placed slavery in the course of ultimate extinction by restricting its spread, that the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the Nebraska policy had moved it toward permanence and nationalization, and that the real difference between the parties was whether slavery was treated as a wrong. Both men disclaimed political and social equality between the races, as Illinois voters of the time expected. At Freeport Lincoln asked whether the people of a territory could lawfully exclude slavery before statehood; Douglas replied that, whatever the Supreme Court held, slavery could not survive without local police regulations, an answer that kept him favor in Illinois but cost him support among Southern Democrats. Later debates returned to the Dred Scott case, the Lecompton Constitution, charges of a conspiracy to spread slavery, and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. At Alton Lincoln called the issue the eternal struggle between right and wrong, and Douglas closed by insisting on self-government and the Constitution as the fathers made it. Republican legislative candidates won more votes statewide, but the Democrats kept the legislature, which returned Douglas to the Senate in January 1859. Lincoln collected the newspaper reports, and the debates were published at Columbus, Ohio, in 1860, the year both men ran for President. The library text gives all seven debates in that edition.

Top Lessons

• Popular sovereignty and the question of a moral limit

  Douglas held that the people of each territory should settle slavery for themselves, a principle he presented as the heart of self-government and the surest way to keep national politics from tearing the country apart. Lincoln answered that a people may decide indifferent questions as they please but cannot be said to have a right to do a wrong. The debates show how a dispute about procedure, who decides, rested on a prior dispute about substance, what is being decided.

• Asking the question that divides an opponent's coalition

  Lincoln's second question at Freeport forced Douglas to reconcile the Dred Scott decision, which denied Congress power to exclude slavery from a territory, with popular sovereignty. Douglas's answer satisfied many Illinois Democrats but alarmed Southern Democrats. The exchange shows how a carefully framed question can expose a strain between two commitments an opponent holds at once.

• The founders as authorities on both sides

  Both candidates appealed constantly to the fathers. Douglas pointed to a Union that had existed for seventy years half slave and half free; Lincoln pointed to the Northwest Ordinance, the closing of the African slave trade, and the founders' expectation that slavery would end. The debates show that an appeal to tradition requires an account of what the tradition actually intended.

• Public sentiment and the office of the speaker

  At Ottawa Lincoln argued that in a self-governing community the person who shapes public opinion does more than the legislator or the judge, because opinion makes statutes and decisions possible to enforce. The debates themselves, attended by thousands and printed in full in the newspapers, were an attempt by both men to form that opinion.

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