Knox College: Lincoln Finds His Voice

Knox College was founded in eighteen thirty-seven in Galesburg, Illinois, by Presbyterian and Congregationalist abolitionists from New York and New England, men and women who came west to build a college and, not incidentally, a station on the Underground Railroad. The original name was Knox Manual Labor College, meaning students were expected to work on the college farm to pay their board. The present name was adopted in eighteen fifty-seven.

On October seventh, eighteen fifty-eight, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held the fifth of their seven Illinois Senate debates on the grounds of Knox. Newspapers estimated the crowd at sixteen to eighteen thousand. It was the largest audience of the entire debate series.

The venue almost was not Knox at all. The debate had been scheduled for a Galesburg city park, but the weather on October seventh was cold and miserable, and the platform was moved to the east side of the college's main building, a red-brick structure called Old Main. Lincoln and Douglas reached the debate platform not by stairs but by climbing through windows in the building's wall. The Knox student body strung a banner above the platform that read, simply, Knox College for Lincoln.

Lincoln scholars generally identify the Knox debate as the moment Lincoln changed. He had spent previous debates in a defensive crouch, responding to Douglas's attacks, trying to explain what he did and did not believe about racial equality. At Knox, standing on a platform above a crowd of many thousands of people in a town built by abolitionists, Lincoln argued for the first time at sustained length that slavery was not a question of policy but of morality. Douglas's position of popular sovereignty, letting each territory decide for itself, was a moral abdication.

Lincoln lost that Senate race. He won the presidency two years later. Old Main is now a National Historic Landmark, the only surviving building from any of the Lincoln-Douglas debate sites.