Knox College and the Fifth Lincoln-Douglas Debate

The building you are passing was the site of one of the most consequential public arguments in American history. On October seventh, eighteen fifty-eight, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas climbed through a window of Knox College's Old Main building, stepped onto a platform built against the facade, and debated before a crowd estimated at ten thousand people or more. It was the fifth of seven joint debates, and Lincoln, wiry and nearly six feet four, reportedly quipped as he emerged from the window, "At last I have gone through college."

But the debate was no joke. The question was slavery, specifically whether the territories could ban it regardless of what the Supreme Court had just ruled in the Dred Scott decision. Douglas argued for popular sovereignty, let the settlers decide. Lincoln pressed the moral wound: a nation half slave and half free could not endure. The crowd, stirred by abolitionist faculty, hung a banner behind the platform reading "Knox College for Lincoln."

That banner was no accident. Knox College and the town of Galesburg had been founded in eighteen thirty-seven by George Washington Gale, a Presbyterian minister from upstate New York who believed education and abolition were the same cause. Gale's earlier school, the Oneida Institute in New York, was a training ground for anti-slavery reformers. He transplanted that mission to the Illinois prairie, and within a few years the town and college were indicted in Knox County court for aiding the escape of fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad. The college's second president, Jonathan Blanchard, was nationally recognized for his work smuggling freedom-seekers north. Knox was designated a Freedom Station by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Old Main, completed in eighteen fifty-seven, is the only surviving original building where a Lincoln-Douglas debate was held. The other six sites are gone. Congress designated it a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-one. Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, but the arguments he sharpened at Knox and the other six debate sites built the national reputation that carried him to the White House two years later.