The Timeless Value of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

With election day fast approaching, debates concluded, and campaigns for the presidency, Senate and House, and state offices making their closing arguments, it is a good time to recall a Senate contest from long ago, one that marked an important milestone on our long journey toward fulfilling the promise of our founding, the proposition that all persons are created equal.

In the summer of 1858, the burgeoning Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln to run for the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas, the Democratic incumbent. After Lincoln and Douglas made a number of separate campaign appearances, their parties arranged a series of seven debates between the candidates. Lincoln, a one-term Congressman, saw an opportunity to gain wider recognition across the state. The well-known Douglas was at first reluctant to debate but saw a need to respond to his challenger.

As these debates took place well before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1913 providing for the direct election of U.S. Senators, Lincoln and Douglas were vying for the votes of the Illinois General Assembly. Each debate was held in a different town on a different day. The debates took place between August and October. The final debate in Alton was held on October 15, 139 years ago this week.

Each debate lasted about three hours. One candidate spoke first for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response from his opponent, and then a final 30-minute rejoinder from the first candidate. There were no moderators to interfere with the exchange between the candidates.

The debates were held outdoors, weather permitting, from about 2 to 5 pm. The fields were full of listeners. Estimated attendance ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 at one debate to a high of between 16,000 and 18,000 at another. Newspaper coverage was intense. The largest papers sent stenographers to report complete texts of each debate. Railroads and telegraph lines spread reports of the debates far beyond their location. Each candidate felt he was speaking to the entire nation.

The debates focused on slavery, specifically its possible extension to the new states to be formed from the western federal territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery in states formed north of the latitude that marks the southern border of the state of Missouri. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, a measure sponsored by Douglas, reopened the slavery extension issue by repealing the territorial bar in the Missouri Compromise and simply leaving it to the settlers in the territories to decide, by exercising their “popular sovereignty,” whether slavery should be allowed or banned in their particular territory.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act spurred the creation of the Republican Party in 1854 on a “free soil” platform opposing the doctrine of popular sovereignty and pledging to keep slavery out of the western territories.

Lincoln, though certainly not an abolitionist, was adamantly opposed to any territorial extension of slavery. He regarded the indifference to extension embodied in the doctrine of popular sovereignty to be an utterly unacceptable validation of a heinous institution whose existence was absolutely antithetical to the founding principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence.

In the Alton debate on October 15, Lincoln hammered home the anchoring truth and fundamental value of the Declaration:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men . . . equal in certain inalienable rights . . . They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

Lincoln was convinced that if we could maintain our commitment to the principles of the Declaration, they could then spread and deepen their beneficial influence and, in time, those principles would stifle slavery. If we could maintain our commitment to our founding principles and contain the spread of slavery then, by containing it, we could kill it. But if we failed in our commitment and became indifferent to the evil of slavery and allowed it to spread, then all people of all colors would ultimately suffer.

As Lincoln said in his speech accepting his party’s nomination on June 16, 1858:

A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

Lincoln would go on to lose the Senate race to Douglas, but Lincoln’s campaign, and especially the debates with Douglas, would propel him forward to the Republican nomination for President just two years later. Full transcripts of all seven debates are available online. They are well worth the time it takes for an unhurried review.

The debates remind us of what greatness has been achieved in our democratic debates in the past, and what might yet be achieved again. And they remind us that the struggle between freedom and tyranny never ends, that a favorable outcome depends on our continuing commitment to our founding principles, that the choice between freedom and tyranny is ours to make, and that our choice is a fateful one. Because, just as in Lincoln’s time, a house divided between freedom and tyranny cannot stand. It will become all one thing, or all the other.