Seminal political debates featuring two of the country’s most skilled orators delivered provocative, reasoned and (occasionally) morally elevated arguments on issues that were tearing the country apart are the focus of today’s #stampoftheday.
Issued on August 27, 1958, the 4-cent stamp marked the 100th anniversary of a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas who was running for reelection. These debates reframed the nation’s bitter argument over slavery, transformed Lincoln into a serious contender for Republican nomination for president in 1860, and laid the groundwork for Douglas’ poor showing in that election.
When the debates occurred, few knew of Lincoln, who had served one undistinguished term in Congress but had become active in the then-new Republican Party which had been founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law drafted in large measure by Douglas that allowed for the potential expansion of slavery into western territories where it had been banned since the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Lincoln was known to be eloquent, thoughtful, and somewhat melancholy and seemed to have little chance to defeat Douglas, a two-term senator who possessed such volcanic energy that he was known as “a steam engine in breeches.” Within three years of arriving in Illinois from his native Vermont, in 1833, he had been elected to the state legislature at the ripe age of 23. Four years later, he was appointed to the State Supreme Court, and six years after that, the state legislature voted to send him to the U.S. Senate. (Until 1913, senators were selected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were technically campaigning for candidates running for that body).
For most of the 1850s, Douglas had performed a political high-wire act, striving to please his Northern supporters without alienating Southerners whose backing he would need for his expected run for the presidency in 1860. Although he personally disliked slavery, according to historian Allen Guelzo, “for Douglas, it’s the controversy about slavery that’s the problem. Douglas’ goal is not to put an end to slavery, but to put an end to the controversy.” To do so, Douglas trumpeted the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which asserted that settlers in any new territory had the right to decide for themselves whether it should be admitted to the union as a slave or free state. This approach, which was the basis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, greatly angered many Northerners. And four years after that law passed, Douglas angered Southerners by opposing the measures that would have led to the admission of Kansas as a slave state.
In contrast, Lincoln detested slavery as morally wrong, economically stifling, and politically unstainable. As he warned in a famous speech given when he accepted the Senate nomination: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand….This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” This did not, he emphasized, mean that he wanted to immediately abolish slavery in the South. Rather, like many Northerners, he preferred gradual emancipation and the compensation of slave owners for their lost property. Moreover, Lincoln tried to make it clear that he was opposed to the political and social equality of the races, points on which he and Douglas agreed.
The three-hour long debates, which drew thousands of people, were written up in newspapers all over the country, crystalized growing disagreements about slavery. Douglas seemed to have the upper hand in the first debate, when he rejected Lincoln’s notion of an irrepressible conflict and disagreed with his analysis of the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Rather, Douglas pointed out, many founders were slaveholders who believed that each community should decide the question for itself, a position that Douglas supported. He was convinced, however, that slavery would be effectively restricted for economic, geographic, and demographic reasons and that the territories, if allowed to decide, would choose to be free.
Things began to turn in the second debate, held on August 27 in Freeport, when Lincoln asked Douglas how his views on popular sovereignty could be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision which found that that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. This decision, Lincoln contended, meant that slavery was going to be legal everywhere. Douglas responded that even though the Supreme Court said that the federal government had no authority to exclude slavery, residents of a territory could keep it out by refusing to pass a slave code and other legislation needed to protect slavery. This widely reported response further alienated pro-slavery Southerners.
Over two months, Fergus M. Bordewich wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, “two of the country’s most skilled orators delivered memorably provocative, reasoned and (occasionally) morally elevated arguments on the most divisive issues of the day. What is less well-known, however, is that those debates also were characterized by substantial amounts of pandering, baseless accusation, outright racism and what we now call ‘spin.'” In the sixth debate, for example, Lincoln said that while “the Negro” could not expect absolute social and political equality, he still enjoyed the same right to the freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that were promised to all by the Declaration of Independence. “In the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man,” Lincoln said. Douglas responded by accusing Lincoln of promoting mob violence, rebellion and even genocide by confining slavery only to the states where it already existed. By not giving slavery room to expand, Douglas claimed, Lincoln would “hem them in until starvation seizes them, and by starving them to death, he will put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction….This is the humane and Christian remedy that he proposes for the great crime of slavery.”
The general consensus was that while Douglas probably got the better of Lincoln in the early debates, Lincoln clearly was the victor in the latter ones and, because Douglas was so well known, this meant that Lincoln generally was the overall victor. In the November elections, Illinois’ voters cast more ballots for Republicans than Democrats. However, because of gerrymandering and the fact that districts were not fairly apportioned according to population, Democrats kept control of the state legislature and voted to send Douglas back to Washington.
Still, the debates introduced Lincoln to a national audience and set the stage for his dark-horse run for the Republican presidential nomination two years later. In contrast, while Douglas won re-election to the Senate, the widespread coverage given to the debates – including to his answer on August 27 – badly hurt his presidential prospects. In 1860, he did get the Democratic nomination for president, but in the general election he would win only one state-Missouri.
This history shows that sometimes highly visible political debates can produce consequential outcomes – a particularly timely reminder because today Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination for president, which should set the stage for presidential debates that could be as important as the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.