Stephen A. Douglas: First Debate with Abraham Lincoln

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the eight years since the Compromise of 1850, sectionalism and the crisis over slavery had worsened. Douglas's 1850 efforts at compromise had, in fact, only exacerbated the conflict for the reasons Douglas had mentioned in Chicago—essentially each side's fear of the other, however irrational he considered those fears to be. In 1854 he had made another attempt to calm things with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which extended popular sovereignty to all U.S. territories, abolishing the geographic limit on slavery enshrined in the Missouri Compromise. This act was interpreted by many as another triumph of the Slave Power. It was directly responsible for the creation of the Republican Party—a party dedicated to at least limiting slavery—as a replacement for the moribund Whigs and a new rival to the Democrats. It led to a state of near anarchy in what was called Bleeding Kansas, with numerous acts of terrorism committed by both pro-slavery and antislavery partisans in an attempt to influence the referendum on the state constitution. In fact, in the “House Divided” Speech, delivered by Lincoln at Springfield on June 16, 1858, in which he formally announced his candidacy as a Republican for Douglas's Senate seat, Lincoln concluded that the most drastic actions would be necessary to fight the Slave Power.

Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty (which Lincoln mocked as “squatter sovereignty,” emphasizing how ridiculous he considered it to allow small, isolated groups of people to decide larger moral questions affecting the whole nation) was, in Lincoln's view, a relatively minor problem compared with the Dred Scott decision. In that famous 1857 case, the Supreme Court refused, on the ground that it lacked jurisdiction, to hear the appeal from the Missouri Supreme Court of the slave Dred Scott, who claimed that his long residence in free territories had abolished his status as a slave. The refusal to hear the case ought to have ended the matter, but President James Buchanan, himself a southerner, conferred with southern justices and brought pressure to bear on one of the northern justices to influence the southern chief justice, Roger Taney, to produce a decision that effectively ended all federal and state limitation of slavery and extended it not only to the territories but also to the free states. After this, in his second debate with Lincoln, Douglas was forced to admit that the only way a state could prohibit slavery under this ruling was by a kind of civil disobedience, refusing to use its police power to support the claims of slave owners requesting return of their human property. This actually quite radical (and desperate) suggestion by Douglas was recalled by southerners during the 1860 presidential campaign and doomed Douglas's chances of election, splitting the Democratic Party and ensuring Lincoln's triumph.

Douglas and Lincoln agreed to hold a series of six debates at various cities across Illinois throughout the late summer and fall of 1858 leading up to the elections for the state legislature. Senators were still elected by the state legislatures rather than by direct election, and the only hope Lincoln had of winning was to change the balance in the predominantly Democratic Illinois House and Senate. Inasmuch as Lincoln had electrified the nation with his “House Divided” Speech to begin the campaign and was challenging the most powerful U.S. senator and the one most directly responsible for the extension of slavery (in reality or possibility), the debates were closely followed by the entire country and set the stage for the presidential election of 1860 between the same two candidates.

Douglas begins his speech by asking Lincoln to reaffirm his support for the 1854 Republican platform, which—while radical enough in seeking to prohibit the spread of slavery to any of the territories and prohibiting the interstate sale of slaves—did not actually seek to end slavery. Douglas's reading of the platform drew cheers from the crowd in northern Illinois, but he says that his object is to make Lincoln's positions absolutely clear, “when I trot him down to lower Egypt.” This refers to southern Illinois, called Egypt to this day because of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers (near the cities of Cairo, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee). Egypt was a region whose inhabitants had strong cultural contact and affinity with the South and generally favored slavery. This type of argument, playing regions of Illinois off against one another, show how important the details of practical politics were to Douglas in contrast to Lincoln, who indeed was happy to alienate those who disagreed with his principled views. Douglas points out that Lincoln expanded these absolute views in his “House Divided” Speech, quoting Lincoln as saying, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Douglas, in contrast, does not see this at all. For him the essence of democratic American government is compromise and toleration, and he firmly believes that each region not only can but also must be left to its own devices, so long as these devices do not violate the Constitution, which clearly permits slavery.

Douglas's appeal on the issue of slavery is frankly racist. He baits Lincoln by referring to his party as “the Black Republican Party.” Douglas unashamedly held racist views himself and assumed the same of his audience. Indeed, it would be a very exceptional individual in the mid-nineteenth century who did not hold racist views. Even Lincoln, in the second debate, admitted that to a remarkable extent he agreed with Douglas on this issue:

I agree with Judge Douglas that he [the negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man. (qtd. in Sparks, p. 399)

Douglas directly appeals to irrational racist fear in his audience. He asks them,

Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves? If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln.

Douglas quite clearly expresses his views on race equality when he states that he believes blacks should never be accepted as citizens or granted voting rights, and further,

I believe this Government [the United States] was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.

As a practical matter, both Lincoln and Douglas expressed the view in the 1850s that free blacks ought to, in most cases, be deported to Africa. In the case of this one particular issue, essentially the nature of race, Douglas's love of compromise and his support for the expression and toleration of minority rights in America disappear when he discussed compromise and rights outside the white community. For him no other political community existed. Ideas about race only began to change in the rush of the rapidly approaching Civil War and would assume their modern form only through a long and bitter historical progress. Even today the older, irrational views endorsed by Douglas have not entirely disappeared.