Which politician debated against lincoln in 1858

Or must it become one or the other? In Illinois, two politicians vying in for a seat in the U. Senate met to debate the issues, as the country looked on. The race for Senate. On June 16, , Abraham Lincoln stepped to the rostrum in the Hall of Representatives in the state Capitol to address the state convention of the Illinois Republican party meeting at Springfield.

Senate against Stephen Douglas, a nationally prominent Democrat who had held the seat for ten years. The bulk of the address, though, was about a conspiracy that threatened the United States—a Democratic plot to legalize slavery in every state in the Union.

One of the co-conspirators, said Lincoln: Stephen Douglas. Douglas denied those charges in a speech three weeks later, on July 9, from the balcony of the Fremont House in Chicago.

Over the following two weeks Lincoln and Douglas made many campaign appearances—separately, and often on the same day in the same place. Then, in a letter on July 24, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates. Several days later, near Bement, the two men met on the road after Douglas had spoken at nearby Monticello, where Lincoln was scheduled to speak later in the day. According to tradition, they arranged to meet at the Bement home of Francis Bryant—a friend of Douglas—to plan the debates.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of formal political debates between the challenger, Abraham Lincoln, and the incumbent, Stephen A.

Douglas, in a campaign for one of Illinois' two United States Senate seats. Although Lincoln lost the election, these debates launched him into national prominence which eventually led to his election as President of the United States. Lincoln and Douglas agreed to debate in seven of the nine Illinois Congressional Districts; the seven where Douglas had not already spoken.

Douglas said yes, clarifying that territories could choose not to enforce Dred Scott by withholding protection for slaveholders under local law. Known as the Freeport Doctrine, this stance alienated many Southerners and would come back to haunt Douglas during his presidential run. Douglas backed the idea common to Jacksonian Democrats that power was best exercised at the local level.

By contrast, Lincoln argued that only the federal government had the power to abolish slavery. In the elections held in November , Lincoln and other Republican candidates won 53 percent of the popular vote statewide. But the congressional districts represented in the Illinois legislature at the time favored the Democrats, and the state legislature chose to return Douglas to the Senate.

Over the next two years, he would hone his arguments on the morality of slavery in speeches around the country, emerging as the dark horse Republican nominee in the presidential election. Douglas succeeded in winning the Democratic nomination in , but with Southern Democrats backing John Breckenridge, he won only one state: Missouri. Exhausted by the campaign, as well as his efforts to rally northern Democrats to the Union cause as the Civil War began, Douglas died in June , at the age of Fergus M.

Norton, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Stephen A. What is less well-known, however, is that those debates also were characterized by substantial amounts of pandering, baseless accusation, outright racism and what we now call "spin.

In our own day, as two dramatically different candidates for president clash across an ideological divide, the oratorical odyssey of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas may offer more than a few lessons—in the power of persuasive rhetoric, the effect of bigotry and the American public's craving for political leaders who are able to explain the great issues of the day with clarity and conviction.

Both then and now, the debates' impact was amplified by changing technology. In , innovation was turning what would otherwise have been a local contest into one followed from Mississippi to Maine. Stenographers trained in shorthand recorded the candidates' words. Halfway through each debate, runners were handed the stenographers' notes; they raced for the next train to Chicago, converting shorthand into text during the journey and producing a transcript ready to be typeset and telegraphed to the rest of the country as soon as it arrived.

Lincoln and Douglas knew they were speaking to the whole nation. It was like JFK in coming to grips with the presence of the vast new television audience.

At the time, Lincoln was not the haggard, hollow-eyed figure of his Civil War photographs. At 49, he was still cleanshaven, with chiseled cheekbones and a faint smile that hinted at his irrepressible wit. And while he affected a backwoods folksiness that put voters at ease, he was actually a prosperous lawyer who enjoyed an upper-middle-class existence in an exclusive section of Springfield, the state capital.

He knew that it made him stand out. For Lincoln, the Republican senatorial nomination was a debt repaid; four years before, he had withdrawn from the contest for Illinois' other U. Senate seat, making way for party regular Lyman Trumbull. To Lincoln's chagrin, some Republican power brokers—including New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley—actually favored Douglas, whom they hoped to recruit as a Republican presidential candidate in In contrast to the moody and cerebral Lincoln, Douglas was gregarious and ingratiating, with a gift for making every voter feel that he was speaking directly to him.

Huston, author of Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality. Four years after that, at 27, he was appointed to the State Supreme Court, and at 33 to the U. On the great issue of their time, the two men could not have been more diametrically opposed. Although Douglas professed a dislike of slavery, his first wife, Martha, who died in , had owned some. During the marriage, the sweat of slaves had provided the natty outfits and luxury travel that he relished.

What Lincoln detested about slavery was not only the degradation of African-Americans but also the broader tyranny of social hierarchy and economic stagnation that the practice threatened to extend across America. But like many Northerners, he preferred gradual emancipation and the compensation of slave owners for their lost property to immediate abolition.

Douglas' goal is not to put an end to slavery, but to put an end to the controversy. For most of the s, Douglas had performed a political high-wire act, striving to please his Northern supporters without alienating Southerners whose backing he would need for his expected run for the presidency in He finessed the looming slavery question by trumpeting the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," which asserted that settlers in any new territory had the right to decide for themselves whether it should be admitted to the union as a slave or free state.

In , Douglas had incensed Yankees by pushing the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress as popular sovereignty; it opened those territories to slavery, at least in principle. Nearly four years later, he angered Southerners by opposing the pro-slavery Kansas state constitution that President James Buchanan supported.

As he prepared to face Lincoln, Douglas didn't want to offend the South any further. Although we regard the debates today as a head-to-head contest for votes, in fact neither Lincoln nor Douglas was on the ballot. That meant that the party holding the most seats in the state legislature could choose who to send to the Senate.

Even this was not as straightforward as it seemed. The sizes of districts varied wildly as a result of gerrymandering, in Illinois' case by Democrats, who dominated state politics. In some Republican-leaning districts, for instance, it took almost twice as many votes to elect a legislator as in pro-Democratic districts.