Lincoln Douglas Debate

3 Key excerpts on "Lincoln Douglas Debate"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Language of Liberty

  The Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

  • Joseph R. Fornieri(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Gateway Editions

    (Publisher)

  Both candidates attempted to gather a broad coalition by rejecting the extreme disunionist views of the northern abolitionists and southern fire-eaters. The debates focused almost entirely on slavery, testifying to the fact that it was indeed the causa sine qua non (cause without which) of the Civil War. In considering the dominance of the slavery issue in 1858, it is instructive to consider what the candidates did not discuss. During the debates little to no mention was made of the tariff, foreign policy, immigration, and the bank, hitherto traditional issues of contention between the two parties. Indeed, one cannot read the historical documents of the Civil War era without acknowledging the centrality of slavery as an “apple of discord” as Lincoln referred to it. The debates constituted a struggle to form public opinion, which began to crystallize into two irreconcilable camps, consisting of those who were committed to the containment and eventual extinction of slavery and those who were committed to its extension and indefinite perpetuation. Although Douglas won the senatorial election, he lost in the court of national public opinion. As will be discussed, during the debates, Lincoln trapped Douglas in a dilemma that further alienated him from the southern wing of the Democratic Party leading to an eventual split at the convention during the election of 1860. Most profoundly, however, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates are of enduring significance in providing two rival interpretations of American political order. They raised fundamental questions about the meaning and destiny of democracy in general, and the American experiment more specifically. Indeed, Douglas and Lincoln defined two radically opposed versions of the Union, which vied against each other for public authoritativeness. The Union, liberty, and the American dream represented something different for each candidate

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  A Nation So Conceived

  Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty

  • Michael P. Zuckert(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  10 In the Shadow of the House Divided

  The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858

  We all think we know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were: the seven face-to-face contests between the two statesmen held up and down the state of Illinois during the fall of 1858 . This is of course quite correct, but just what constituted the debates is more ambiguous than this description suggests. In one sense, the Lincoln-Douglas debates took place during the entire period between 1854 , when Douglas set out to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Lincoln returned to politics to rebut him, and 1860 , when the two opposed each other for the presidency.

  The first definition of wherein the debates consisted is in some respects too narrow, the second too broad. It is best, I think, to take the debates to have been the exchanges between the two surrounding the Senate election of 1858 , supplemented by the 1859 speeches by both in Ohio and by Lincoln at Cooper Union in 1860 . The opening statement is thus the “House Divided” speech and the closing statement actually the first part of Lincoln’s Cooper Union address, itself directed against Douglas’s revised version of his popular sovereignty doctrine as presented in his 1859 Harper’s Magazine article “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority.”

  Defining the debates in this way implies that much of what we will deem to be part of them did not in a strict sense occur in a debate format, with both candidates present at the same time and place, addressing and responding directly to each other. Many of the most important statements by both candidates were made when the other was not on the same stage but often was in the audience. Understood in this broad sense, the debates occurred in two stages, the first consisting of the period from the “House Divided” speech to the end of the formal debates at Alton in October 1858 , the second from the appearance of Douglas’s Harper’s article in the fall of 1859 through Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union in February 1860 .1

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  The Best Presidential Writing

  From 1789 to the Present

  • Craig Fehrman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  From the Ottawa Debate with Stephen Douglas (1858)

  “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence”

  When Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat, in 1858, he did so as a long shot. To increase his odds, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates. They argued about slavery and whether it should spread to America’s new territories and states, and although Lincoln lost the race, he knew these issues would continue to dominate national politics. In 1860 Lincoln and Douglas faced off again, this time for the White House, and Lincoln worked obsessively to produce a book that gathered the texts of their old debates—not a Jackson-style campaign biography, in other words, but a new kind of political book made up of the candidates’ own words. Lincoln’s book became an enormous bestseller, presenting exchanges like this one, from Lincoln’s response to Douglas at their first debate, directly to readers and voters.

  N ow, gentlemen, I hate to waste my time on such things, but in regard to that general abolition tilt that Judge Douglas makes—when he says that I was engaged at that time in selling out and abolitionizing the old Whig Party—I hope you will permit me to read a part of a printed speech that I made then at Peoria, which will show altogether a different view of the position I took in that contest of 1854:

  … It is wrong—wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence.…

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