Lincoln and Douglas, Seven Debates That Changed America

In the summer and fall of eighteen fifty-eight, two men traveled the length of Illinois arguing about the future of the country. One was Abraham Lincoln, a one-term congressman and Springfield lawyer who had challenged Senator Stephen A. Douglas for his Senate seat. The other was Douglas himself, the most powerful Democrat in the nation, the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and a man so short and so broad-shouldered that people called him the Little Giant. Lincoln was six feet four. The contrast was theatrical.

They agreed to a series of seven debates, one in each of seven Illinois congressional districts: Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton. The format was unsparing. Opening speaker, sixty minutes. Response, ninety minutes. Rejoinder, thirty minutes. No microphones. The crowds, many of them farmers who had traveled miles in wagons, numbered in the thousands. Reporters transcribed every word in shorthand and telegraphed the text to newspapers across the country.

The central question was whether slavery could be legally excluded from new territories by popular vote of the settlers. Douglas said yes, a position Lincoln showed was incompatible with the Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling of eighteen fifty-seven. At Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas to reconcile these positions directly. Douglas's answer, which became known as the Freeport Doctrine, said that settlers could in practice exclude slavery by simply refusing to pass laws protecting it. The answer may have helped Douglas keep his Senate seat. It cost him the South, and likely the presidency, two years later.

Lincoln lost the Senate race. But the printed transcripts of the debates were read across the North. They established Lincoln as a national figure and defined the moral terms of the slavery debate with a clarity that would carry him to the Republican nomination in eighteen sixty. The debates were not merely an Illinois event. They were the opening argument of the Civil War.