by Alison Dornheggen, Assistant Director

Identified as one of the most sensational senatorial campaigns in our country’s history, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 specifically refer to a series of seven debates between incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas (D) and a young, relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln (R). These debates garnered national attention and became the focal point in their battle for the U.S. Senate seat representing the state of Illinois. However, the exchanges between Douglas and Lincoln began four years earlier, in 1854.

On October 3, 1854, Douglas spoke to an audience at the Illinois State Fair defending the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he had authored and which had become law earlier that year. This Act gave the citizens of Kansas and Nebraska the right to decide if slavery would be allowed within their states once statehood had been granted. The Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery above the geographical line of 36o31’ N, excepting the parts of Missouri falling above that line.

The repeal of the Compromise reinvigorated the slavery debate for the country, and particularly captured the outrage of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had served as a U.S. Representative for Illinois in the 1840s, but at the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was simply a practicing lawyer in Springfield. After hearing Douglas’s State Fair speech, Lincoln reinitiated his political career the following day by publicly refuting Douglas’s arguments. Lincoln delivered a similar speech in Peoria, Illinois, on the evening of October 16, again immediately after Douglas. (One of Lincoln’s more famous orations, it is now known as the Peoria Speech.)

Upon accepting his official nomination as the Illinois Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1858, Lincoln delivered his “House Divided speech,” to which Douglas responded three weeks later in Chicago. Despite sitting next to Douglas on that night of July 9, 1858, Lincoln chose to respond to Douglas the very next evening after the senator had already left the city. His rebuttal asserted that the Declaration of Independence was colorblind, its tenets of liberty applying to every person in the country, regardless of race.

A week later Douglas spoke in Bloomington, and again Lincoln observed his opponent from the audience. Eventually a correspondence between the two formalized a series of debates in the remaining seven counties of Illinois. In Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton, standing-only crowds of record-breaking numbers (estimated from 1,500 to more than 15,000, depending on the location) came to witness the events now known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.

The principal argument of these debates centered on slavery, specifically the issue of how it was to be handled with the expansion of the U.S. territory. Douglas argued for each state’s right to choose its own position toward slavery, while Lincoln argued that this approach would only perpetuate slavery, further deepening the divide between free and slave states. As Lincoln saw it, the national government needed to intervene in the issue of slavery, putting it on a path toward confinement and, eventually, toward its ultimate demise.

Though Lincoln failed to win the senatorial race of 1858, the national visibility of these debates gave him recognition that eventually led him to greater victory when he defeated Douglas in the Presidential race of 1860.