The Lincoln–Douglas debates were a series of seven debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides that senators shall be elected by the people of their states, was ratified in 1913, senators were elected by their respective state legislatures. Therefore, Lincoln and Douglas were trying to win the people's votes for legislators in the Illinois General Assembly, aligned with their respective political parties.
The debates were designed to generate publicity—some of the first examples of what in modern parlance would be characterized as "media events". For Lincoln, they were an opportunity to raise both his state and national profile and that of the burgeoning Republican Party, newly organized four years before in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. For Senator Douglas, they were an opportunity to defend his record—especially his role in promoting the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which, under the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the white people of each new state to decide whether to allow slavery in the state. The candidates spoke in each of Illinois's nine congressional districts. They had already spoken in the state capital of Springfield and in the state's largest city of Chicago within a day of each other, so they decided that their future joint appearances would be held in the remaining seven congressional districts. Since Douglas was the incumbent, he had very little to gain from these debates. However, Lincoln, only a one-term U.S. Representative (congressman) a decade before, was gaining support, having spoken the day after Douglas spoke in Chicago, and thus presenting a rejoinder Douglas could not answer back with a rebuttal. Each debate lasted about three hours, with each candidate speaking for sixty minutes, followed by a ninety-minute response and a final thirty-minute rejoinder by the first candidate.Douglas and Lincoln alternated who spoke first at the debates; as the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four. They were held outdoors, weather permitting, from about 2 to 5 p.m.
The debates focused on slavery, specifically on whether it should be allowed in the new states to be formed from the western federal territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Mexican Cession of 1849. Douglas, as the Democratic candidate, held that the decision should be made by the white residents of the new states rather than by the federal government ("popular sovereignty"). Lincoln argued against the expansion of slavery, yet stressed that he was not advocating its abolition where it already existed.
Never in American history had there been widespread newspaper coverage of political debates. Both candidates felt they were speaking to the whole nation. New technology had become available in recent years: railroad networks, the electric telegraph with its Morse code, and Pitman shorthand writing, at that time called "phonography". The state's largest newspapers, based in Chicago, sent phonographers—now known as stenographers—to copy and report complete texts of each debate; thanks to the new railroads, the debates were not hard to reach from Chicago. Halfway through each debate and series of speeches, runners were handed the stenographers' notes. They raced to meet the next train to Chicago, handing the notes to railway riding stenographers who during the journey converted the shorthand symbols and abbreviations back into their original words, producing a transcript ready for the Chicago typesetters printing presses, and for the telegrapher, who sent the texts to the rest of the country east of the Rocky Mountains, which was as far as the telegraph wires reached. The next train would deliver the conclusion of the debate. The papers published the speeches in full, sometimes within hours of their delivery. Some newspapers helped their preferred candidate with minor corrections, reports on the audience's positive reaction, or tendentious headlines ("New and Powerful Argument by Mr. Lincoln–Douglas Tells the Same Old Story"). The newswire of the Associated Press, then only a decade old, sent messages simultaneously to multiple points, enabling newspapers and magazines east of the Rockies to print the debates soon after they occurred, which led to the debates rapidly becoming nationally followed events. They were later republished as pamphlets.
The debates took place between August and October of 1858. Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance in Ottawa (Illinois), 16,000 to 18,000 in Galesburg, 15,000 in Freeport,
12,000 in Quincy, and at the last debate in Alton, 5,000 to 10,000. The debates near Illinois's borders (Freeport, Quincy, and Alton) drew large numbers of people from neighboring states. A number travelled within Illinois to follow the debates.
Douglas was re-elected by the Illinois General Assembly, 54–46. But Lincoln's party had won the popular vote in what historian Allen Guelzo labels "an upset, not just in terms of those voting statistics", but in making Lincoln a national figure and laying the groundwork for his 1860 presidential campaign.
As part of that endeavor, Lincoln edited the texts of all the debates and had them published in a book. It sold well and helped him receive the Republican Party's nomination for president at the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Douglas was elected to the United States Senate in 1846, and he was seeking re-election for a third term in 1858. The issue of slavery was raised several times during his tenure in the Senate, particularly with respect to the Compromise of 1850. As chairman of the committee on U.S. territories, he argued for an approach to slavery called popular sovereignty: electorates in the territories would vote whether to adopt or reject slavery. Decisions previously had been made at the federal level concerning slavery in the territories. Douglas introduced the Kansas–Nebraska Act in the Senate. It became law on May 30, 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise and "substituting for the ban on slavery what Douglas called 'popular sovereignty' ... arous[ing] a storm of protest throughout the North". The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's Mr. Lincoln and Friends Society notes that prominent Bloomington, Illinois resident Jesse W. Fell, a local real estate developer who founded the Bloomington Pantagraph and who befriended Lincoln in 1834, had suggested the debates in 1854.
Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, and he served a two-year term in the House of Representatives. During his tenure in the Congress, he disagreed with Douglas and supported the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery in any new territory. He returned to politics in the 1850s to oppose the Kansas–Nebraska Act and to help develop the new Republican Party.
Before the debates, Lincoln charged that Douglas was encouraging fears of amalgamation of the races, with enough success to drive thousands of people away from the Republican Party. Douglas replied that Lincoln was an abolitionist for saying that the United States Declaration of Independence applied to both blacks and whites.
Lincoln argued in his House Divided Speech that Douglas was part of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery. Lincoln said that ending the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in Kansas and Nebraska was the first step in this nationalizing and that the Dred Scott decision was another step in the direction of spreading slavery into Northern territories. He expressed the fear that any similar Supreme Court decision would turn Illinois into a slave state.
Much has been written of Lincoln's rhetorical style but, going into the debates, Douglas's reputation was daunting. As James G. Blaine later wrote:
He [Douglas] was everywhere known as a debater of singular skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate, which, in its intensity, resembles a physical contest, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. There was no halting in his phrase. He used good English, terse, vigorous, pointed. He disregarded the adornments of rhetoric,—rarely used a simile. He was utterly destitute of humor, and had slight appreciation of wit. He never cited historical precedents except from the domain of American politics. Inside that field his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical. Beyond it his learning was limited. He was not a reader. His recreations were not in literature. In the whole range of his voluminous speaking it would be difficult to find either a line of poetry or a classical allusion. But he was by nature an orator; and by long practice a debater. He could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions. He could, if he wished, incite a mob to desperate deeds. He was, in short, an able, audacious, almost unconquerable opponent in public discussion.