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 Four years later he pushed through passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise banning slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase and opened up those territories and the new territories taken in the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.]
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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.
