Lincoln pulled no punches in his debates with Douglas
Abraham Lincoln got right to the point when he faced off with Stephen A. Douglas in their historic debates that concluded 150 years ago.
“I ask the attention of the people here assembled and elsewhere, to the course that Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question of making slavery national,” Lincoln said on the afternoon of Aug. 21, 1858, in Ottawa.
He continued his charges during subsequent debates on Aug. 27 in Freeport, Sept. 15 in Jonesboro, Sept. 18 in Charleston, Oct. 7 in Galesburg, Oct. 13 in Quincy, and Oct. 15 in Alton.
The future president had not yet been considered an abolitionist, but he believed in his heart that slavery should not be permitted to spread into territories that would become states.
Lincoln claimed that Douglas would like nothing better than to have the Supreme Court render another Dred Scott-type opinion that no state could constitutionally exclude slavery.
“When that is decided and acquiesced in, the whole thing is done,” he predicted. “This being true, and this being the way as I think that slavery is to be made national, let us consider what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end.”
Noting the vast influence that his adversary was exerting on public sentiment, Lincoln termed it “so great that it is enough for many men to profess to believe anything, when they once find out that Judge Douglas professes to believe it.”
Later, to cheers and laughter, Lincoln lamented that “I cannot shake Judge Douglas’ teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision. Like some obstinate animal … that will hang on when he has once got his teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold.”
In closing, Lincoln feared the day when Douglas would “succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views” and when the people would “repeat his views and avow his principles.”
“Then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision, which he endorses in advance, to make slavery lawful in all the states – old as well as new, North and well as South.”
Debaters described
In the view of Isaac Newton Arnold, a contemporary of the two adversaries, “These debates made Douglas senator, and Lincoln president.”
In “Reminiscences of the Illinois Bar, Forty Years Ago; Lincoln and Douglas as Orators and Lawyers,” his 1881 speech to the Illinois State Bar Association in Springfield, Arnold described the strengths and weaknesses of each.
“Lincoln had two advantages over Douglas,” he observed. “He had the best side of the question, and the best temper. He was always good humored, always had an apt story for illustration, while Douglas, sometimes, when hard pressed, was irritable.”
During the debates, Douglas often received the loudest cheers and applause. He was happy with popular acclaim, while “Lincoln aimed at permanent conviction.”
Arnold noticed that “when Lincoln closed, the people seemed solemn and serious, and could be heard, all through the crowd, gravely and anxiously discussing the topics on which he had been speaking.”
A close friend and colleague of Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Arnold was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1860, the year that Lincoln became president. Arnold’s 1862 bill abolished slavery in U.S. territories.
In 1864, he introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery throughout the states. It failed, but was renewed in 1865 and adopted on Dec. 6 of that year.