STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
AND THE
AMERICAN UNION
6. The Great Debate
The struggle over Kansas coincided with Douglas's preparations for the Senate election of 1858. After beating back Buchanan forces, Douglas was able to secure the Democratic nomination. To oppose him, the Republican party selected Springfield attorney Abraham Lincoln.
When Lincoln first proposed a series of face-to-face debates between the two candidates, Douglas was unenthusiastic. As the incumbent, he had much to lose and little to gain by granting Lincoln greater recognition. But the prospect of being able to confront Lincoln on the same platform convinced him to accept.
Presented in seven Illinois towns from August to October of 1858, the Douglas-Lincoln debates drew surprisingly large crowds and detailed press coverage. Despite their high visibility, though, they were only part of a greater ongoing debate over the future of the federal Union. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the battle over Lecompton had raised fundamental questions about democracy, republicanism, and human liberty. The debate had also been enlarged by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which disputed popular sovereignty by denying territories the right to exclude slavery.
Lincoln opened the campaign on an ominous note. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he told Republicans in Springfield. The government could not endure half slave and half free; it would either become all one thing or all the other. Lincoln further charged that James Buchanan, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and Stephen A. Douglas were the chief agents of the a slavery "dynasty" seeking to promote the spread of slavery over the entire nation.
Douglas answered with conspiracy charges of his own. Lincoln and the Republicans, he said, were plotting with Buchanan loyalists to split the Democratic party and force Douglas out of the Senate. Throwing the "House Divided" speech back in the face of its author, Douglas charged that Lincoln seemed either to be inviting northern abolitionists to invade the South or daring southern slaveholders to conquer the North. Popular sovereignty was the only sure path to resolution of the slavery question, Douglas said. Let the people of the territories decide the issue for themselves, and let the federal government restrain itself from intervention, as the Founding Fathers had intended.
The contest between Douglas and Lincoln was a melange of charges and counter charges, with occasional demagoguery on both sides. In public, the only point on which both candidates agreed was that blacks, whether slave or free, could not be granted social and political equality with whites. But past that point, on the question of slavery itself, the divergence was clear.
Drawing a fine distinction, Lincoln argued that while social inequality was acceptable, slavery violated the Declaration of Independence's proclamation that all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the Declaration did not apply to slaves, he asked, how could it apply to immigrants from Ireland, or Scandinavia, or France? Slavery threatened all free Americans because it undercut the ideal of human liberty.
Ever conscious of the fragile compromises holding the Union together, Douglas shifted the argument from moral to legal grounds. The constitutional balance of federal authority and states' rights, he said, was an inheritance from the Founding Fathers and should not be overturned. To suggest that abolishing slavery was more important than preserving the Union was to invite fratricidal war.
When the votes were counted in November 1858, the Republicans had won a popular majority on a statewide basis, but the Democrats commanded a clear majority of legislative seats. By a vote of 54 to 46, the legislature awarded Douglas the victory, and he returned to Washington to resume his work in the Senate.
In his absence, the Buchanan loyalists had been hard at work. When Douglas arrived, he found that he had been stripped of the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. Angered but undaunted, he threw himself into preparations for the presidential election of 1860. The fundamental issues that illuminated the great debate between Douglas and Lincoln would now be contested in every region of the country.
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS AND THE AMERICAN UNION