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By Root 1613 0

repetitious and sometimes tedious. Each candidate made unsubstantiated charges against the other. Douglas, according to Lincoln, had joined in a plan to nationalize slavery (although somewhat incongruously, Lincoln also condemned him for indifference as to whether slavery did or did not spread into the territories). Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, Douglas declared, had conspired to destroy the Whig and Democratic parties in order to “abolitionize” Illinois and satisfy their hunger for political office. Each presented himself as a moderate while accusing the other of being too radical for their state. Lincoln, Douglas asserted, advocated “monstrous” doctrines that threatened to bring on “warfare between the North and the South.” Lincoln accused Douglas of diverting the nation from the course regarding slavery on which the founding fathers had embarked. With former Whig voters in central Illinois holding the balance of power, each claimed the political mantle of Henry Clay (oddly in the case of Douglas, who had opposed most of what Clay stood for during his long political career).

Yet despite their imperfections, there was something remarkable about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Carl Schurz, who had emigrated from Germany after the failed revolution of 1848 and emerged in the 1850s as a prominent western Republican, recorded in his memoirs having been “deeply impressed by the democratic character of the spectacle…. Here were two men, neither of whom had enjoyed any of the advantages of superior breeding or education…[who] contended for…mastery by appealing to the intelligence and patriotism of the people.” The debates, as Republican political leader James G. Blaine later noted, exemplified how American politics had been transformed in the preceding two years. Despite the onset in 1857 of an economic downturn whose effects still lingered in Illinois, the candidates completely ignored economic matters. As Blaine recounted, they did not mention “protection, free trade, internal improvements, the subtreasury, all the issues, in short, which had divided parties for a long series of years.” The debates focused on “one issue” and one alone, Blaine continued, thus reflecting “the public mind” of the late 1850s. Indeed, in Lincoln’s correspondence with constituents and party leaders in 1858, slavery and the rights of blacks were virtually the only matters to receive attention. Overall, the debates offered a serious public discussion of the most fundamental problem dividing the nation and the first real gauge of the impact of the Dred Scott decision on American politics. As a Washington newspaper observed, thanks to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Illinois “becomes, as it were, the Union.”22

The first debate took place on August 21 at Ottawa, a town in northern Illinois whose population of around 9,000 more than doubled on the day of the encounter. A few days earlier, an old friend had advised Lincoln that thus far in the campaign he had “acted too much on the defensive.” He urged him to “assail” Douglas “at every vulnerable point.” But as the opening speaker, Douglas immediately seized the initiative with a scattershot series of charges: Lincoln had sided with the country’s enemies during the Mexican War; was responsible for radical resolutions adopted by a local Republican convention in 1854 that included calls for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and abolition in the District of Columbia; and intended to “make all the institutions uniform, and set the niggers and white people to marrying.” Thrown on the defensive, Lincoln seemed to have difficulty responding.23

The night before the second debate, scheduled for August 27 in the small town of Freeport (population around 5,000) located in northern Illinois, a group of Republican leaders met to plot strategy. They urged Lincoln to counterattack vigorously. He should repudiate the more radical planks of the 1854 platform, ask Douglas “a few ugly questions,” and portray him “as a traitor & conspirator, a proslavery, bamboozelling demagogue.” So, after beginning by stating that he favored