1858
THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES:
Foreshadowing the Civil War
From August to October of 1858, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, took on the incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas in a series of seven debates. Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched as the two men argued over the primary issue facing the nation at the time: slavery and the battle over its extension into new territories.
As the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas was one of the most prominent politicians in the country and seen as a future presidential contender. The controversial 1854 law repealed the Missouri Compromise and established the doctrine of popular sovereignty, by which each new territory joining the Union would decide for itself whether to become a free or slave state.
Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act had drawn Lincoln, a lawyer and former one-term Whig congressman, back into the political arena. He had launched a Senate run in early 1855 but stepped aside to make way for another candidate.
By 1858, Lincoln was the most prominent leader in the new Republican Party in Illinois and the clear choice to run against Douglas. He kicked off his campaign in earnest with a speech in Springfield that June, in which he famously declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand … this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
Lincoln and Douglas met in seven debates in different congressional districts around the state. In all, they traveled more than 4,000 miles during the Senate campaign. While Lincoln traveled by railroad, carriage or boat, Douglas rode in a private train fitted with a cannon that fired a shot every time he arrived in a new location.
Each debate followed the same structure: an hour-long opening statement by one candidate, an hour and a half-long response by the other candidate, and a half-hour rebuttal by the first candidate. Despite their length and often tedious format, the debates became a huge spectacle, attracting crowds of up to 20,000 people. Thanks to the many reporters and stenographers who attended, and new technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad, the candidates’ arguments drew national attention and fundamentally altered the national debate over slavery and the rights of Black Americans.
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