The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Overview

The Lincoln-Douglas debates are four hundred pages in the standard edition and they were seven afternoons in the late summer and autumn of 1858, at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton. Illinois was choosing a legislature, and the legislature would choose a senator; the contest was between Stephen A. Douglas, the incumbent Democrat and the most powerful man in the Senate, and Abraham Lincoln, a country lawyer and former one-term congressman.

The format is the thing to understand first. One candidate spoke for an hour. The other replied for an hour and a half. The first then had half an hour to answer. They alternated who opened, and Douglas got four of the seven. Three hours, outdoors, no amplification, no notes for much of it, before crowds that arrived by train and wagon and stood throughout.

The exchanges were taken down by shorthand reporters and printed in full in partisan newspapers, which sometimes improved their own man and garbled the other. Lincoln collected them into a scrapbook in 1860 and had them published as a campaign book, which is where the standard text comes from.

They are not comfortable reading. Both men appeal to the racism of their audience, Douglas constantly and Lincoln more than his admirers like to remember, particularly at Charleston in the southern part of the state.

What happens

The question. Congress had banned slavery north of a line across the Louisiana Purchase in 1820. In 1854 Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed that line and substituted popular sovereignty: let the settlers of each territory decide. Kansas then produced several years of fraud and violence. In 1857 the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from any territory at all, that slaves were property, and that Black people were not and could not be citizens.

Lincoln had come out of political retirement over Kansas-Nebraska. His argument was that the founders had treated slavery as a wrong to be contained and expected to die, that Douglas’s principle removed the containment, and that a policy of not caring whether it spread would end with it everywhere.

Douglas’s case. He was formidable and the debates are worth reading mostly because he is. His position had three parts. Self-government: it is for the people of a territory to decide their own domestic institutions, and any other view is a denial of democracy. Union: the country has always existed half slave and half free and can continue to, and Lincoln’s house-divided doctrine is a programme for war. And race: he accused Lincoln repeatedly and explicitly of believing in the equality of the Black man with the white, and of wanting intermarriage and citizenship, and he made this the emotional centre of every debate.

Lincoln’s case. He denied the racial charges, at Charleston in terms that are painful to read, saying he was not and never had been in favour of political and social equality, of voting, of jury service, of intermarriage. And then he made the distinction he returned to all autumn: whatever else is true, the Black man is entitled to the fruits of his own labour, and in that he is the equal of Douglas and of himself.

The main argument was moral. The real issue, he said at Alton, is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, and the difference between him and Douglas is that Douglas does not think slavery is wrong. Popular sovereignty is a procedure for deciding a question, and a procedure is only neutral if the question is a matter of indifference. On drainage or on cattle, let the settlers vote. On whether one person may own another, saying you do not care which way the vote goes is itself a position.

He also pressed the legal contradiction. Douglas endorsed Dred Scott, which said no government could exclude slavery from a territory, and also endorsed popular sovereignty, which said the settlers could.

Freeport. At the second debate Lincoln put that contradiction as a direct question: can the people of a territory, in any lawful way, exclude slavery before statehood?

Douglas’s answer, now called the Freeport Doctrine, was that they could, in practice, by simply declining to pass the local police regulations that slavery requires, since the institution cannot exist a day without friendly legislation. It was a clever answer and it satisfied Illinois.

It also finished him in the South, where it was read as a manual for nullifying Dred Scott. Two years later the Democratic Party split in two, ran separate candidates, and Lincoln won the presidency with under forty per cent of the vote. Whether Lincoln planned that is argued about; he certainly understood the question was dangerous for Douglas.

The result. Douglas’s party won the legislature and he kept his seat. Lincoln wrote afterwards that he was glad he had made the race, that it gave him a hearing on the great question of the age, and that though he sank out of view he believed he had made some marks that would tell for the cause of civil liberty long after he was gone.

How to read it

Do not read all seven straight through. They repeat, deliberately, because each audience was new. Read Ottawa for the opening positions, Freeport for the question and the answer, and Alton for Lincoln’s fullest statement of the moral argument.

Read the Peoria speech of 1854 first if your edition has it. It is where Lincoln worked out the position, it is better constructed than anything in the debates, and it contains the passage about hating the declared indifference to slavery’s spread.

Take Douglas seriously. He is not a fool and he is not simply a villain; he has a real democratic principle, a real constitutional argument, and the better claim under the law as the Court had just stated it. The debates are only interesting if his case is allowed its weight.

Do not skip Charleston. Lincoln’s statements there about racial equality are the hardest thing about him for modern readers, and they are in the record, and reading them is part of reading honestly. The historical argument about what he believed, what he was willing to say in southern Illinois, and how his position moved between 1858 and 1865 is a real one and is not settled by choosing a quotation.

Notice what a three-hour argument makes possible. Both men restate their opponent’s case at length before answering it, return to points made an hour earlier, and are held to what they said at the previous debate three weeks before. Nothing in modern political speech resembles it.

Questions it raises

• Is popular sovereignty a neutral procedure? Lincoln’s case is that on a moral question the procedure smuggles in an answer. Does that generalise?
• Douglas had the better legal argument after Dred Scott. What is a politician supposed to do when the law is settled and wrong?
• Lincoln denied believing in social and political equality and insisted on the right to the fruits of one’s labour. Is that a coherent position or a calculated one?
• A house divided cannot stand. Was that an observation or a prophecy that helped bring about what it described?
• The Freeport question cost Douglas the South. Should a debater ask a question designed to destroy an opponent’s coalition rather than to elicit truth?
• Lincoln lost and became president because of it. What does that say about what public argument is actually for?