Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories.
The slavery extension question had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise nearly 40 years earlier. The Mexican War, however, had added new territories, and the issue flared up again in the 1840s. The Compromise of 1850 provided a temporary respite from sectional strife, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—a measure Douglas sponsored—brought the slavery extension issue to the fore once again. Douglas’s bill in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise by lifting the ban against slavery in territories north of the 36°30′ latitude. In place of the ban, Douglas offered popular sovereignty, the doctrine that the actual settlers in the territories and not Congress should decide the fate of slavery in their midst.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act spurred the creation of the Republican Party, formed largely to keep slavery out of the western territories. Both Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty and the Republican stand on free soil were seemingly invalidated by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court said that neither Congress nor the territorial legislature could exclude slavery from a territory.
When Lincoln and Douglas debated the slavery extension issue in 1858, therefore, they were addressing the problem that had divided the nation into two hostile camps and that threatened the continued existence of the Union. Their contest, as a consequence, had repercussions far beyond determining who would win the senatorial seat at stake.
When Lincoln received the Republican nomination to run against Douglas, he said in his acceptance speech that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and that “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Douglas thereupon attacked Lincoln as a radical, threatening the continued stability of the Union. Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of debates, and the two eventually agreed to hold joint encounters in seven Illinois congressional districts.
The debates, each three hours long, were convened in Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Douglas repeatedly tried to brand Lincoln as a dangerous radical who advocated racial equality and disruption of the Union. Lincoln emphasized the moral iniquity of slavery and attacked popular sovereignty for the bloody results it had produced in Kansas.
At Freeport Lincoln challenged Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. Douglas replied that settlers could circumvent the decision by not establishing the local police regulations—i.e., a slave code—that protected a master’s property. Without such protection, no one would bring slaves into a territory. This became known as the “Freeport Doctrine.”
Douglas’s position, while acceptable to many Northern Democrats, angered the South and led to the division of the last remaining national political institution, the Democratic Party. Although he retained his seat in the Senate, narrowly defeating Lincoln when the state legislature (which then elected U.S. senators) voted 54 to 46 in his favour, Douglas’s stature as a national leader of the Democratic Party was gravely diminished. Lincoln, on the other hand, lost the election but won acclaim as an eloquent spokesman for the Republican cause.
In 1860 the Lincoln-Douglas debates were printed as a book and used as an important campaign document in the presidential contest that year, which once again pitted Republican Lincoln against Democrat Douglas. This time, however, Douglas was running as the candidate of a divided party and finished a distant second in the popular vote to the triumphant Lincoln.