Lincoln and Douglas Debate

"The prairies are on fire," reported a New York newspaper in 1858 (Holzer, 1) gazing west to take the temperature of the most heated election contest in the nation. In the summer of that turbulent year, as American slid perilously closer to the brink of disunion, two Illinois politicians seized center stage and held the national spotlight for two months. Through the sheer force of their words, personalities, and ideas, Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen Douglas transformed a local contest for the U.S Senate into a watershed national debate on the continuous issues of slavery and, indeed, on the principles upon which this country was founded. The Lincoln- Douglas Debates were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for senate in Illinois, and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time the U.S senators were elected by state legislatures; this Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois legislature. The debates previewed the issues that Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 presidential election. The main issue discussed in all seven debates was the also the key issue for the American people at the time, slavery. In agreeing to the debates, Lincoln and Douglas decided to hold one debate in each of the nine congressional districts in Illinois. Because both had already spoken in two- Springfield and Chicago- within a day of each other, they decided to " join" appearances in the rest of the remaining seven districts.

The debates have been treated often in historical and biographical writing, but they have been regarded as important historical events rather than as significant texts. The effects of the debates, not their content, have been the focus. There has been considerable disagreement among historians as to what the effects were. The early accounts exalted Lincoln and denigrated Douglas as little more than an apologist for slavery. Revisionists defended Douglas's theory of popular sovereignty as the middle ground between slavery and abolition and denounced Lincoln for so starkly drawing the issues that compromise was impossible and the nation lurched toward civil war. However a dominant theory and agreement is that the debates are important as milestones on Lincoln's road to the presidency or as steps to Douglas's demise to the national appeal.

There were a set of seven debates from Lincoln and Douglas.

The main theme of the debates was slavery, especially the issue of slavery's expansion into the territories. It was Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and replaced it with the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which meant that the people of a territory could decide for themselves whether