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Podcast Transcript
The summer of 1858 in Illinois was one of the hottest on record. Yet, the weather paled in comparison to the rising political temperatures in the state.
What should have been a routine U.S. Senate campaign turned into a profound turning point in American history.
Abraham Lincoln, a former four-term state assemblyman, mounted a challenge against the powerful incumbent, Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
The upstart Lincoln called for a series of seven debates across the state, and much to his surprise, Douglas accepted.
Learn more about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and how they changed the country on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In the years preceding the Civil War, America lived in a constant state of political crisis. For ten years, regional tensions had torn at the fabric of the Union. The territorial gains from the Mexican-American War reintroduced the word “secession” into the American political vocabulary.
The issue of slavery’s expansion, seemingly settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, suddenly thrust itself back into the center of a national debate.
The dynamic growth of the 1850s completely unraveled the compromise that had held the country together for over thirty years, a deal that had drawn a literal line across the continent to divide free soil from enslaved soil. Expansion exposed these deep fault lines.
As the nation added new states, the specter of slavery emerged every single time. Between the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War, the United States added 11 new states, each bringing its own crisis over whether geography would support the expansion of slavery.
As Illinois prepared for the senatorial election of 1858, tensions ran dangerously high. In Illinois, prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment, eligible voters did not elect U.S. Senators directly; they elected state legislators, who then chose the state’s federal senators.
This indirect system did not diminish the intensity of the campaign.
Driven by a desire to spark America’s westward railroad expansion, the incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas became the chief champion of a concept called “popular sovereignty.” This doctrine dictated that the federal government step aside, allowing local voters in new territories to decide the question of slavery for themselves.
Popular sovereignty triggered violent confrontations across the Kansas territory, culminating in abolitionist John Brown killing five pro-slavery settlers.
The controversy surrounding the Lecompton Constitution, a proposed state constitution for the Kansas territory, only compounded the crisis. Backed by President James Buchanan, this rigged, pro-slavery document fractured the Democratic Party and set the stage for a dramatic showdown in Illinois.
Stephen A. Douglas broke with the President and Southern Democrats over the Lecompton Constitution, turning his 1858 reelection campaign into a fight for his political life.
Compounding the drama, the Supreme Court issued the historic Dred Scott decision in 1857. The Dred Scott decision held that Black Americans could not be U.S. citizens, that Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories, and that enslaved people remained property even when taken into free territory.
Illinois was important because of its geography. Illinois is a very long state. Its north-south axis runs more than 400 miles. The northern border of Illinois is like a different country compared to its southern tip. Cairo, Illinois, is actually farther south than Richmond, Virginia, the future capital of the Confederacy.
The divisions splitting Douglas’ Democratic party stood on full display across the state. The southern parts of Illinois embraced the Lecompton Constitution, supported the Dred Scott decision, and supported the expansion of slavery.
Meanwhile, the northern section opposed all of these and sought to limit the expansion of slavery, fully aware that reversing the institution entirely meant civil war.
He needed to state his case to both the Northern and the Southern parts of the state to retain his seat and lay the groundwork for a future Presidential run.
Abraham Lincoln occupied a very different position in 1858. Lacking Douglas’ name recognition and political reputation, Lincoln had to make a bold, statewide case if he was going to unseat the incumbent.
Illinois mirrored American politics at the time, prompting one Washington newspaper to note: The forces of the Union will fight the great battle in Illinois.
The newly formed Republican Party stood ready to join the fight. Formed in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 in opposition to the Douglas-championed Kansas-Nebraska Act, the young party had already tasted victory in Illinois. In 1856, the Republican candidate for governor, William Bissell, won a tightly contested three-way election, defeating Democratic candidate William A. Richardson by a mere two percent of the vote.
Yet, the Republican Party in Illinois faced the exact same challenge as the Democrats: a deeply divided electorate. The old Whig Party once dominated American political life, but it collapsed under the political strain.
If the Compromise of 1850 cracked the Whig Party’s foundations by exchanging California’s entry into the union as a free state for a robust Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered the party entirely.
The Whigs fractured into a Northern section that strongly opposed the expansion of slavery and a Southern section that focused on immediate economic interests, advocating for the continued expansion of slavery and the preservation of the Union.
Illinois presented a remarkable confluence of factors for the dying Whig Party, mirroring the trends seen among the Democrats. Northern Whigs in Illinois drifted to the Republicans, rallying around their collective aversion to slavery. Southern Whigs gravitated toward the Democratic Party.
Despite his standing as a formidable two-term Senator with national recgonition, presidential aspirations, and deep institutional support, when Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates, he had to accept.
Lincoln wisely proposed seven towns for the debates: two in the North, where his arguments would be welcomed, and two in the South, where they would be challenged. In the North, Douglas would be on the defensive, whereas in the South, the roles would be reversed. The remaining three debates took place in central Illinois, giving both candidates an opportunity to expand their base of support.
The structure of the debates look refreshing compared to modern political debate formats. The opening candidate had 60 minutes to state their case and build an argument; the second candidate had 90 minutes to respond; and the first candidate had the final 30 minutes for a rebuttal. Unlike modern debates, there was no moderator to ask the candidates questions.
The candidates alternated the opening slot across the seven stops, and both men pledged and maintained the strict decorum of never interrupting their opponent.
It is quite impressive that the two candidates managed to maintain this agreement amid more than 20 hours of grueling debate across the state, before hostile and boisterous crowds.
That doesn’t mean that the two candidates simply sat there placidly. They were human, and they openly shook their heads whenever they disputed a point on stage. While Douglas paced back and forth like a caged lion, Lincoln constantly took notes to record his thoughts.
The two rivals stood as complete physical opposites. Standing six-foot-four, Lincoln cast a literal shadow over Douglas, who stood a full foot shorter at five-foot-four.
For nearly two months, from summer into early fall, these polar opposites debated states’ rights, economics, and slavery.
Unlike Lincoln, Douglas viewed slavery through a pragmatic political lens rather than a moral one, treating the institution not as a national sin, but as a local administrative matter for voters to handle. Whenever presented with an opportunity to make a stand against slavery on moral grounds, Douglas found his bearings on the middle ground, casting it as an issue for local authorities.
While Lincoln had long disliked the institution, a passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act fundamentally transformed his opposition from a quiet disagreement into a fierce moral crusade.
His evolution was on full display in one of his most famous speeches, given in Springfield on June 16, 1858, just weeks before the debates began. Lincoln adopted soaring, almost biblical rhetoric when he declared:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free… 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 alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Lincoln often evoked the words of the Declaration of Independence believing the phrase “all men are created equal” within the preamble lay at the very heart of the matter.
Douglas sharply disagreed, maintaining that the Founders fully intended the nation to remain permanently partitioned between free and slave states.
While Lincoln was warning that slavery was causing the house to fall, Douglas placed his complete faith in popular sovereignty as the solution. He famously summarized his moral indifference to the institution on the national stage, declaring: I care not whether slavery is voted down or voted up; that is not the question for the Union.
But at the second debate in Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln backed Douglas into a corner, forcing him to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision.
Douglas responded with a compromise that became known as the Freeport Doctrine. He argued that, regardless of Supreme Court rulings, slavery could not exist for a day anywhere without local police regulations and slave codes to protect it.
Therefore, if a territory’s citizens opposed slavery, they simply had to elect representatives who would refuse to pass those protective laws.
While Douglas reduced human bondage to a routine local vote, Lincoln forced the public to confront the raw injustice of slavery as a national sin.
After seven intense debates across Illinois, the votes came back as expected. The Northern part of the state cast their ballots for Lincoln and the Republicans, while the Southern part supported Douglas.
In the end, Lincoln and the Republicans were unable to woo enough of the disaffected Whig voters from Central Illinois to overcome the strength of the state’s entrenched Democratic political machine.
The election was incredibly close. When the final ballots were counted, Democrats won 54% of the seats in the Illinois legislature, and those state representatives duly reelected Stephen Douglas as their U.S. Senator.
Yet, the long-term implications of these debates on American political culture were extraordinary. The most obvious result was the sudden elevation of Abraham Lincoln into a national political figure,
Conversely, the fallout for the Democratic Party was catastrophic. Douglas’s failure to support the Lecompton Constitution, along with his prescription for avoiding slavery in areas that didn’t want it, deeply alienated Southern Democrats.
When it came time to cast their votes for the presidency in 1860, Southern delegates refused to support Douglas. They split the party entirely, opting instead to run their own Southern Democratic candidate, John C. Breckinridge, with Douglas receiving the presidential nomination from the Northern Democrats.
The splintering of the Democrats triggered a true multi-party crisis. Alongside Lincoln and Douglas, the race featured Breckinridge and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.
Douglas’ indecisive stance on slavery led him to a fourth-place finish, carrying only the state of Missouri. Likewise, the party’s division handed Abraham Lincoln the presidency.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates did not settle the great question of slavery, and Stephen Douglas won the election, so in the immediate sense, Douglas won the debate.
But in the larger sweep of history, Lincoln won something far more important: a national audience. The debates revealed the moral, political, and constitutional fault lines that were pulling the country apart, and they transformed Lincoln from a respected Illinois lawyer into a serious national figure.
Two years later, those same arguments would carry him to the presidency, and the unresolved issues debated across Illinois in 1858 would soon be decided not at the ballot box or on a debate stage, but on the battlefields of the Civil War.
