Everything about The Lincoln-douglas Debates Of 1858 totally explained
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. 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'd 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
1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
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
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. 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 territories. Lincoln expressed the fear that the next Dred Scott decision would make Illinois a
slave state.
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 him.
Lincoln and Douglas each exaggerated the extremism of the other. 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
The main theme of the debates was slavery, especially the issue of slavery's 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. 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 wasn't 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 can't endure permanently half Slave and half Free."
As Douglas said, (audience response in parentheses)
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. Lincoln didn't 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,
As Lincoln said,
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, can't be safely disregarded."
Lincoln said that Douglas' public indifference to slavery would result in slavery expansion because it would mold public sentiment to accept slavery. As Lincoln said,
Lincoln said Douglas "cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up," and that, in the words of
Henry Clay, he'd "blow out the moral lights around us" and eradicate the love of liberty.
At the debate at Freeport 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. As a result, Southern politicians would use their demand for a slave code for territories such as Kansas to drive a wedge between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party. 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, in 1860.
Douglas' efforts to gain support in all sections of the country through popular sovereignty failed. By allowing slavery where the majority wanted it, he lost the support of Republicans led by Lincoln who thought Douglas was unprincipled. By defeating a pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution and advocating a Freeport Doctrine to stop slavery in Kansas where the majority were anti-slavery, he lost the support of the South.
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. At this debate Lincoln went further than before in denying the charge that he was an abolitionist, saying that:
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." 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, 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 Douglas sought again to prove that Lincoln was an abolitionist with the following quotes from Lincoln:
Declaration of Independence:
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:
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."
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. However, the widespread media coverage of the debates greatly raised Lincoln's national profile, making him a viable candidate for nomination as the Republican candidate in the upcoming
1860 presidential election. He would go on to secure both the nomination and the presidency, besting Douglas (as the
Northern Democratic candidate), among others, in the process.
The
Lincoln-Douglas debate format that's 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.
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