Month: August 2024

Less than a week after their first debate in Ottawa, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas ventured into Freeport, Illinois, for the second of their seven joint debates during the senate election of 1858. By all standards, Freeport turned out to be the most consequential. From it came the Freeport Doctrine.

Freeport sits in the northern part of Illinois, which meant that it was generally settled by northern state migrants and tended to be more antislavery. Lincoln was on safer ground here. The joint debate agreement stipulated that the two candidates would alternate who spoke for the first hour, after which the other candidate had ninety minutes to speak, followed by a thirty-minute wrap up by the first speaker. Since Douglas started in Ottawa, Lincoln got to speak first in Freeport.

He started by answering the seven interrogatories (aka, questions) posed by Douglas in Ottawa. There was some danger to doing so as Douglas had tried to peg Lincoln as a “Black Republican,” that is, a radical leftist and abolitionist who wanted not only the end of slavery but the complete equality in all respects for African Americans. Lincoln as actually a moderate on those points, noting that the U.S. Constitution effectively barred the federal government from abolishing slavery in the states where it already existed. Indeed, all of the northern states that had banned slavery had done so at the state level, and Lincoln and others understood that the same would have to happen for any remaining slave states. In addition, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, while it failed to acknowledge the immorality of slavery, was unfortunately the law of the land. Being an honest man, notwithstanding the danger even in a generally favorable part of Illinois, Lincoln reiterated and responded to Douglas questions:

Question 1. “I desire to know whether Lincoln to-day stands, as he did in 1854, in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave law?”

Answer. I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave law. [Cries of “Good,” “Good.”]

Q. 2. “I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to-day, as he did in 1854, against the admission of any more slave States into the Union, even if the people want them?”

A. I do not now, or ever did, stand pledged against the admission of any more slave States into the Union.

Q. 3. “1 want to know whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a Constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make?”

A. I do not stand pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union, with such a Constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make. [Cries of “good,” “good.”]

Q. 4. “I want to know whether he stands to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia?”

A. I do not stand to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.

Q. 5. “I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to the prohibition of the slave-trade between the different States?”

A. I do not stand pledged to the prohibition of the slave-trade between the different States.

Q. 6. “I desire to know whether he stands pledged to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the United States, North as well as South of the Missouri Compromise line?”

A. I am impliedly, if not expressly, pledged to a belief in the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the United States Territories.

Q. 7. “I desire him to answer whether he is opposed to the acquisition of any new territory unless slavery is first prohibited therein?”

A. I am not generally opposed to honest acquisition of territory; and, in any given case, I would or would not oppose such acquisition, accordingly as I might think such acquisition would or would not agravate [sic] the slavery question among ourselves. [Cries of good, good.]

After showing he was responsive to Douglas’s questions, Lincoln posed four of his own. He asked:

Question 1. If the people of Kansas shall, by means entirely unobjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State Constitution, and ask admission into the Union under it, before they have the requisite number of inhabitants according to the English bill-some ninety-three thousand-will you vote to admit them? [Applause.]

Q. 2. Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution? [Renewed applause.]

Q. 3. If the Supreme Court of the United States shall decide that States cannot exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor of acquiescing in, adopting and following such decision as a rule of political action? [Loud applause.]

Q. 4. Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory, in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question? [Cries of “good,” “good.”]

Feeling pressured to respond truthfully as Lincoln had done, Douglas’s answer to the second question would come back to haunt him.

Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?

The question directly positioned Douglas’s Popular Sovereignty (from his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854) against the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (of 1857). Douglas was forced to choose between alienating those people he required to get reelected to the Illinois Senate or the Southerners he needed in his third run for the presidency two years later. After some obfuscation, Douglas finally responded that people in a territory could keep out slavery despite the Dred Scott decision, which stated that federal and state governments had no authority to exclude slavery because it would deprive slaveholders of their “property” rights without due process.

Southerners, who wanted the ability to expand slavery without limit, had grown concerned that states could choose to exclude slavery in accordance with Douglas’s Popular Sovereignty. They saw the Dred Scott decision as confirming their right to bring slaves wherever they wanted, and now Douglas was saying that was not true, that states could somehow choose not to allow slavery intrusion. This presented a long-term problem for slave-owning states. While they knew that most of the new territories were grossly inadequate for growing cotton, which was still the primary driver of the need for enslaving millions of their fellow Americans based solely on the color of their skin, they recognized that every new slave state would increase their representation in Congress—and their continued power to dictate policy.

Lincoln and Douglas would debate five more times during the campaign. When the votes were counted, Lincoln’s Republican party had won the popular vote and picked up seats in the legislature. But the state legislature, which due to gerrymandering would remain majority Democratic despite the vote totals, was still choosing Senators. Douglas retained his Senate seat. Lincoln likely realized his chances of winning the seat were close to nil because of the legislature’s makeup. When he was asked why he would give Douglas an advantage for Senate reelection, Lincoln replied that he had a longer view in mind: Douglas might win the Senate, but he would lose the presidency. The Freeport Doctrine would see to that.

It would be almost three weeks before the next debate in Jonesboro deep into the southern part of the state and with a significantly different view on slavery than Freeport.

[Photo of Lincoln-Douglas statues in Freeport, IL by David J. Kent.]

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas engaged in perhaps the most important series of debates on American history, the haggling over which I discussed in my last post. Their first debate took place on August 21, 1858, in Ottawa, Illinois.

While we usually refer to them as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, at the time there were referred to as the Douglas-Lincoln debates. Douglas was the incumbent U.S. Senator and de facto leader of the right wing conservative Democratic party. He had risen to fame in 1850, taking Henry Clay’s failed omnibus bill and turning it into five separate bills known as the Compromise of 1850. The most notable of the five were the creation of California as a free state and the formidable Fugitive Slave Law. Four years later he pushed through passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise banning slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase and opened up those territories and the new territories taken in the Mexican American War to a principle he called Popular Sovereignty. In short, Popular Sovereign meant that people in all territories and newly forming states could choose for themselves whether to enslave other Americans on the basis of color of their skin. This issue of expansion of slavery was the primary focus for both Lincoln and Douglas in the debate series.

Ottawa was, and remains, a small town southwest of Chicago. Newspapers report “Twelve Thousand Persons Present!” for the debate held in a small park now graced with full size statues of the two men perched on a podium in the center of a fountain. Being in the northern part of the state, most of the residents of Ottawa were migrants from New England, Ohio, and Indiana and thus more likely to oppose the extension of slavery. Later the two men would debate in the southern part of the state populated mostly by migrants from slave states like Kentucky. But Lincoln was on safer ground here in Ottawa. Still, Douglas was the incumbent senator, owned land in the Chicago area, and generally well liked. He also had a favorable state legislature where senators were still picked (the direct election of senators by the people would not occur until the 17th Amendment in 1913).

Douglas mainly stuck to his stump speeches heavy on pandering to racism and fears that somehow banning the extension of slavery to western territories would unleash millions of former southern slaves into the free state of Illinois. Douglas argued that this supposed influx would violate the Illinois state constitution “black laws” severely limiting the presence of African Americans, free or enslaved, in the state. He accused Lincoln of wanting full political and social equality for Blacks, something Lincoln would find himself having to refute. “Mr. Lincoln and his party…are trying to array all the Northern States…against the South, to excite a sectional war between the free States and the slave States,” Douglas would argue.

Lincoln countered this by pointing out how slavery was morally wrong and the primary source of conflict since the beginning of the country: “I leave it to you to say whether, in the history of our government, this institution of slavery has not always failed to be a bond of union, and, on the contrary, been an apple of discord and an element of division.” Lincoln and the recently formed Republican party – a progressive party arisen from the ashes of the liberal northern Whigs and the antislavery factions of other parties – emphasized the immorality of slavery but limited their platform to barring the extension of slavery into the western territories. Despite Douglas’s race baiting, Lincoln repeatedly said that the party would make no effort to abolish slavery in the states where it still existed. He understood that the U.S. Constitution effectively blocked the federal government from dealing with slavery in the states, and that all the northern states that had abolished slavery had done so at the state level. Lincoln reiterated that it was up to the states to rid themselves of the horror of slavery. But Lincoln also emphasized that the federal government did have the right to limit slavery in the federal territories like the District of Columbia and all the territories west of the Mississippi River.

Since Douglas had the privilege of making the opening arguments in Ottawa (they would alternate in the seven debates), he posed a series of questions to Lincoln with the expectation they would be answered in the next debate in Freeport. Lincoln would answer, but also propose four questions of his own to Douglas, which became the most consequential result of the debates for both their future political careers. I’ll have more on that next week when I talk about the Freeport debate.

[Photo of Lincoln-Douglas statues in Ottawa, IL by David J. Kent.]

 

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity andEdison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

Stephen A. Douglas had been selected by the Illinois State Legislature to serve as senator in the same year that Abraham Lincoln was elected by the people to serve in the House of Representatives. Lincoln would serve only a single term, heading back home to a more pedestrian life as a circuit lawyer. Roused to get back into politics following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which his old rival Douglas had pushed through Congress, Lincoln found himself in 1858 trying to block Douglas’s reelection and become a senator himself. Perhaps if Douglas would agree to a series of debates?

On July 24, Lincoln wrote to Douglas:

“Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvass?”

Douglas had little to gain. He was the incumbent senator, highly influential, and the state legislature that made the final senate selection was overwhelmingly gerrymandered to reelect him. He had known Lincoln for two decades and debated him many times. Douglas acknowledged to friends that Lincoln was a formidable debater. Why should he take the risk of debating?

After some hesitation, Douglas responded with a certain amount of indignance and some accusations that Lincoln wanted to include third-party candidates–which Lincoln just as indignantly denied–and some rather whining complaints about the tardiness of asking for joint debates. After more discussion, Douglas offered the following to Lincoln:

“I will, in order to accommodate you as far as it is in my power to do so, take the responsibility of making an arrangement with you for a discussion between us at one prominent point in each Congressional district in the state, excepting the second and sixth districts, where we have both spoken and in each of the cases you had the concluding speech. If agreeable to you I will indicate the following places as those most suitable in the several Congressional districts at which we should speak, to wit, Freeport, Ottawa, Galesburg, Quincy, Alton, Jonesboro & Charleston.”

In his response, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas was not correct that Lincoln “had the concluding speech” in Chicago and Springfield, but notwithstanding this misrepresentation, he accepted the proposed seven joint debates. Douglas followed up on July 30 by stipulating the times and places:

• Ottawa – August 21
• Freeport – August 27
• Jonesboro – September 15
• Charleston – September 18
• Galesburg – October 7
• Quincy – October 13
• Alton – October 15

Douglas also in that letter agreed to Lincoln’s suggestion that the two of them alternate the opening and closing of the debates, stipulating that:

“I will speak at Ottawa one hour; you can reply occupying an hour and a half and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport you shall open the discussion and speak one hour, I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for half an hour. We will alternate in like manner at each successive place.”

The following day, Lincoln responded in a bit of a whiney tone that “although, by the terms, as you propose, you take four openings and closes to my three, I accede, and thus close the arrangement.”

The debates were on!

[Photo of Lincoln-Douglas statues in Freeport, IL by David J. Kent. This post was originally published at Lincolnian.org]

 

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity andEdison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.