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It's an incredible deal. Stay on top of what's happening by signing up at washingtonpost.com slash pod. That's washingtonpost.com slash pod. One in three women and one in four men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, and nearly half of survivors delay leaving because they can't bring their pets with them. Purina started the Purple Leash Project to help eliminate one of the many barriers domestic abuse survivors face, a lack of pet-friendly domestic violence shelters. Through the Purple Leash Project, Purina is helping to create more pet-friendly domestic violence shelters across the country so abuse survivors and their pets can escape and heal together.
Visit purina.com slash purple to get involved. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. In 1858, a series of debates took place in Illinois that turned a one-time and little-known trial lawyer and one-time, one-term US representative into the forefront of American political life. We're talking about Abraham Lincoln. Here to tell the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is Dr. Alan Gilso, a distinguished research scholar at Princeton University and author of numerous books, including Lincoln and Douglas, the debates that defined America. And we wanna thank the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this audio.
Let's get into the story. Well, I think we really have to begin with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 because that was the real trigger for Lincoln's emergence to national prominence. He said himself that October that the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the previous May, took us by surprise.
And he's speaking collectively of northerners, of anti-slavery people. It took us by surprise. It astounded us. We were thunderstruck and stunned and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But, he said, we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach, a scythe, a pitchfork, a chopping ax, or a butcher's cleaver.
And we struck, he said, in the direction of the sound and we are rapidly closing in upon him. Well, him in this case was the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Stephen Arnold Douglas. Lincoln always spoke of himself as being naturally opposed to slavery. He also never urged direct action against it. And the reason he never urged direct action against slavery, before 1854 at least, was because he said the time will come and must come when there will not be a single slave within the borders of this country. This is what he meant when he talked about the gradual extinction of slavery or putting slavery on a path toward ultimate extinction. What he meant was there was no need to force a solution to the slavery problem because the slavery problem was solving itself. The Great Missouri Compromise of 1820 had reserved almost all of the original Louisiana purchase lands in the West for organization as free territories.
And then eventually for admission as free states. Slavery would remain penned in where it was on the South and there it would eventually asphyxiate because everybody knew or at least thought that they knew that slavery required space in which to expand. Lincoln stuck to that belief even after the Mexican war added the modern Southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada to the American domain, because he convinced himself that slavery could never flourish in those arid regions.
People referred to them as the great American desert. And in fact, California was admitted to the union as a free state in 1850. So at least until then, Lincoln saw no reason to worry. But in 1854, his old political nemesis and the rising star of the Democratic Party, Stephen A. Douglas, concluded that the territories reserved by the Missouri Compromise for Freedom back in 1820 would never be opened for settlement while Southern pro-slavery congressmen were blocking their organization. Well, Douglas was eager to see those territories developed. So he wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.
Kansas and Nebraska being the shorthand description of virtually all of the West, north of the Missouri line. And the bill would repeal the restrictions on slavery in the Missouri Compromise and allow the settlers of those lands, Kansas and Nebraska, to decide for themselves whether they wished to legalize slavery as they organized themselves as territories and then as states. This is what Douglas called popular sovereignty.
In other words, let the people in the territories decide their own future. Lincoln called it betrayal. Betrayal of the Missouri Compromise. Betrayal of his confidence that slavery was on the road to ultimate extinction. Betrayal of the guiding principles of the Declaration of Independence. Because popular sovereignty through the Declaration's announcement that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to the winds.
And reduced liberty and equality to political rewards that voters could extend or withhold as they pleased. Let that become the rule for the West and slavery would spread all over the old Louisiana Purchase. And when it did, it would gain enough political hefting Congress to force the repeal of the Free State's bans on slavery and legalize slavery everywhere in the United States. In other words, Lincoln went to sleep the night before the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed, confident that slavery was on its way out the door, and woke up the next morning to find that it had kicked back into life and was threatening to take over the whole house. And you've been listening to Alan Gelzo tell the story of what would become the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the setup, the background to what would prompt this remarkable discourse between Lincoln and Douglas and make Lincoln a national star, or at least get him to a level of national prominence.
And it was a perfect summation there by Gelzo. Lincoln went to sleep the night before the Kansas-Nebraska Act, certain or near certain that slavery would ultimately extinguish itself, and woke up the next morning understanding fully that, indeed, the United States Congress had breathed new life into the institution of slavery. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates here on Our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life, and all the things that matter in life. If you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
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So why would God say homosexuality is wrong and then make someone a homosexual? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions from people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church.
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That's upfaithandfamily.com. ["O Christmas Tree"] And we continue with our American stories and Dr. Alan Gelzo and the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Let's return to the story. I mean, it is remarkable when you think about it, comparing the kinds of things that are called presidential debates today, which really are a little more than kind of televised, short-order press conferences, a one-hour opening by one speaker, an hour and a half response, a half, three hours on their feet talking nonstop and thousands of people come out. I mean, to the first debate in Ottawa, Illinois, 25,000 people are estimated to have come out that afternoon. I mean, that's a marker just in itself of how important democratic thinking and democratic decision-making was. But debating in particular occupied a very important part of that political life because debating really had a surprisingly long history in American politics. I mean, the most famous debate before, of Lincoln and Douglas anyway, was the debate in the Senate in 1830 between Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne over the nature of the union. Abolitionists and slaveholders had been debating each other in public for quite some time.
There was a debate in October of 1845 in Cincinnati between Jonathan Blanchard and Nathan L. Rice. This was a debate stretched over four days upon the question, is slaveholding in itself sinful and the relation between master and slave a sinful relation? Yeah, they talked about sin. Sin actually was a perennial topic for public debate. Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Disciples of Christ, challenged the freethinker Robert Owen to a public debate in Cincinnati in 1829, and then conducted a 12-day long debate on baptism in Lexington, Kentucky in 1843, presided over by nobody less than Henry Clay, the great Henry Clay representative and senator from Kentucky, perennial presidential candidate, and Lincoln's, as he put it, Lincoln's beau ideal of a statesman. In those days, every small town seemed to have its debating society, as did every small college. And Lincoln had been part of such a debating society as a 20-something in New Salem, Illinois.
In fact, Lincoln and Douglas together had debated each other as far back as 1839. What's peculiar about these debates and what really separates them from what we tend to see as debates today is that in the strictest sense, they weren't debates at all. They were more like sequences of speeches without very much in the way of back and forth between the speakers. There were no moderators to interrupt or pose questions.
The only role the moderator had was to introduce each speaker. The debaters simply took turns standing up and speaking to the question at issue. There were debating manuals, like James McElligott's The American Debater of 1855 and Burleigh's Legislative Guide of 1856. These set out rules for order in debate, but these rules really only described how to keep the speakers in an orderly sequence. The most common form of debates in the American 19th century were these sequential speech events.
And usually they are held at the same places on the same day, and frequently these are described as the universal Western style of conducting a political campaign. So while the Lincoln and Douglas debates may look extraordinary to us in their difference from modern debating, they were actually very much par for the course in the mid 1850s. If there's any clear goal in view with these debates, it really seemed principally to be the goal of getting them transcribed and then printed in newspapers or sometimes even published afterward as books. So in that way, debate was really intended for print rather than to be heard. And therefore the emphasis will fall more on the logic of ideas than on putting on a dramatic performance. The carnival atmosphere, the carnival atmosphere of the debates is something we don't really expect from Lincoln and Douglas. We sometimes expect we're gonna get something much more dignified.
And yet it was there. I mean, these debates are constantly punctuated by brass bands, barbecues, banners, especially banners. When Douglas spoke at Rock Island, Illinois on October 29th, right at the end of the campaign, the banners, the crowds held up, told the whole story of his campaign. They had models like popular sovereignty now and forever. This country was made for white men, down with Negro equality and so on and so forth like that. They were very, in that respect, they were very participatory kinds of events. But Lincoln and Douglas in these debates really represent two divergent ideas about democracy, which were struggling for supremacy in America at that time. This was not just a debate about slavery.
It wasn't even just a debate about slavery's legalization in the West. It was really fundamentally about what we think democracy means and involves. Douglas's notion of democracy and the notion of many Americans was that majorities decide all questions, purely on the grounds of being a majority and without respect to theories of political right or political wrong or moral right or moral wrong. All that mattered to Stephen A. Douglas was whether the process of recognizing a majority was fair and above board. After that, he did not care what conclusion the majority enacted.
And he said so very plainly. On the slavery question, he liked to say and did say on the floor of the Senate. He didn't care whether Kansas or any of the other Western territories voted slavery up or voted it down, so long as the vote was legitimate and expressed the will of the people. For Douglas, the key word in democracy was process.
Let the process be correct. And the results were irrelevant. Douglas, in fact, balked at dragging morality into political questions because he feared how divisive, how paralyzing that might make those questions. Lincoln, by contrast, thought of politics as a moral pursuit. If process was the key word for Douglas, then the key word for Lincoln was principle. He didn't doubt that the basic operating principle of a democracy is that a majority, by virtue of being a majority, ought to rule. But there were certain moral limits on the questions that majorities should be allowed to decide, certain moral lines that even majorities could not cross, certain transcendent and foundational truths which no amount of carefully guarded process could repeal. Lincoln opposed slavery because it was a violation of that morality, because it trampled down a self-evident truth, liberty. Douglas argued that the people ought to be allowed to legalize slavery if they wanted to. Lincoln argued that minds, which could not see that slavery was an abomination, were operating on the wrong principles.
Process versus principles. In the end run, the Lincoln-Douglas debates are about which is going to predominate in American political life. And you've been listening to Dr. Alan Gelzo, author of numerous books, including Lincoln and Douglas, The Debates That Defined America. And my goodness, the debate lines were clear. And by the way, as you heard from Dr. Gelzo, these were less debates than they were series and sequences of speeches.
And my goodness, the number of people who attended these things, 25,000 on just one occasion. They were there to see the difference in the end between these two men, their approaches to democracy itself. One emphasized process, and that of course would be Douglas, and the other, principle. It wasn't as if Douglas didn't care about principle, or that Lincoln didn't care about process. But in the end, the animated passion of these two men, that became the demarcation line.
And when we come back, we're gonna learn more about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, what happens next here on Our American Stories. $400 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So, if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad, get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar quality cosmopolitans, martinis, Manhattans, and more. All in just 30 seconds, all for 100 off.
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That's B-A-R-T-E-S-I-A-N.com slash cocktail. How do we go about supporting government leaders when we may not want to vote for or support any of them? Do babies who die in the womb go to heaven? Are there only certain reasons in the Bible that are valid for divorce? Is IVF an option for Christian couples? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny, and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions for people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church. To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike.
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Now I can go through my day pain-free. Go to PowerStep.com slash OAS and use code OAS for 15% off your first order. That's PowerStep.com slash OAS and use code OAS for 15% off your first order. I don't know if you know this, but when you don't have time to read The Washington Post, you can listen to it. Almost every article has a listening option and right now you can become a Washington Post subscriber for just 50 cents a week.
It's an incredible deal. Stay on top of what's happening by signing up at WashingtonPost.com slash Pod. That's WashingtonPost.com slash P-O-D. Hey, I'm here to tell you about Upfaith and Family, the leading streaming service for uplifting entertainment. This Christmas, cozy up with the ones you love and experience movies that inspire and bring people together. Watch Festival of Trees where holiday competition leads to unexpected friendships or the heartwarming family movie of Bluegrass Christmas. And don't miss our special Virtual Christmas Fest event on Monday, November 25th. Meet stars from these movies like Aaron Bethea, Franco Lopresti, Emily Alitalo and Shawn Johnson as they answer fan questions live and share holiday memories. It's all commercial free and you can stream anywhere. Plus it's just a fraction of the cost of other services. Start your free trial today and experience the magic of Christmas.
Visit UpfaithandFamily.com. ["O Christmas Tree"] And we return to Our American Stories and Dr. Alan Gelzo, author of numerous books including Lincoln and Douglas, The Debates That Defined America. And we want to thank the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this audio. Let's return to the story here again.
It's Dr. Alan Gelzo. For Stephen Douglas, the Declaration of Independence was a historical artifact, not a universal aspiration. Douglas had said in 1857 that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain. And therefore the guarantees about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness didn't apply to everyone, weren't intended to apply to everyone, but only to people of a particular race, a particular nation, a particular time, a particular culture. And that was what Douglas led off with in the opening debate in Ottawa, Illinois, when he said, I believe this government was made on the white basis by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.
And I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men. Lincoln's reply was to point out that Douglas says no man can defend the Declaration except on the hypothesis that it only referred to British white subjects and that no other white men are included. And from that Lincoln was quick to point out that must mean that it does not speak alike to the downtrodden of all nations, German, French, Spanish, et cetera, but simply meant that the English were born equal and endowed by their creator with certain natural or equal rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that it meant nobody else. And that allowed Lincoln to ask whether Democrats like Douglas are willing to have the gem taken from the Magna Carta of human liberty in this shameful way, or will they maintain that it's declaration of equality of natural rights among all nations is correct.
For Lincoln, the declaration was his ancient faith. It teaches me that all men are created equal and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another. Anything which produced slavery was not democracy.
That was monarchy, the divine right of kings to rule the rest of humanity. As Lincoln said in the next to last debate in Alton, Illinois, it is the same spirit that says, you work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle, constant, universal of application all around the world.
All around the world. Some people have never forgiven Lincoln for saying, as he did at the opening of the fourth debate at Charleston, Illinois, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. And he went on from that to say, I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
Now, listening to that, it is damaging. It makes him sound like a white supremacist. But listen, listen to what else Lincoln says. I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas. He is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment, but in the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns.
He is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man. Now, you see, Lincoln is drawing here a distinction which we do not often draw today, but which was common in his time, between natural rights and social or political rights. Natural rights are the rights described in the Declaration, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Possessing them is what makes us human. They are hardwired into human nature and every one of us possesses those rights in equal quantities.
And as Jefferson himself said, the hand of force may destroy them, but cannot disjoin them. Political and social rights are something different. Political and social rights do not define our humanity.
They define our participation in communities. And in democratic communities, majorities decide what those social and political rights are. Social and political rights do not define our humanity. I mean, for instance, we don't give 10-year-olds the right to vote, but that doesn't make them less human.
Maybe to their siblings it does, but you know, beyond that, it doesn't make them less a human being, much less a citizen. Now, in the same way, precisely because, unlike natural rights, social and political rights can change in a democratic community as members of that community are persuaded to change the social and political rules, so the entire environment of social and political rights is malleable. We used to set eligibility for voting rights at age 21. Well, as of 1971 and the 26th Amendment, 18-year-olds could now vote. That allowed me to cast my first federal vote that year.
But it didn't mean that I was any less human the year before. So Lincoln, by asserting the equal natural rights of black people, is really saying something well in advance of Stephen A. Douglas. And no one understood that better than Douglas himself, because he responded by saying that conceding natural equality to black people would eventually result in conceding social and political equality too. I mean, Douglas indulged race-baiting through the debates, which was so provocative, I can't repeat it here. But he insisted all along that he bore black people no ill will. I mean, Douglas said, I hold that humanity and Christianity both require that the Negro shall have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives. But notice, those were not privileges or rights or immunities which black people enjoyed by their own natural right. The moment you began to talk about black people possessing natural rights, Douglas warned you're on the high road to social and political rights and social and political equality. Douglas claimed at Ottawa, we have provided that the Negro shall not be a slave and we've also provided that he shall not be a citizen, but the Republicans say that he ought to be made a citizen. And when he becomes a citizen, he becomes your equal with all your rights and privileges. You know, that may have been the one point in the debates where Stephen A. Douglas was absolutely right.
When we come back, the final segment of the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates here on Our American Stories. And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So, if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad, get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar quality cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and more. All in just 30 seconds, all for 100 off.
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That's B-A-R-T-E-S-I-A-N dot com slash cocktail. Is mental illness sin? Why does God want us to wait until marriage to have sex? LGBTQ people say that they were born that way.
So why would God say homosexuality is wrong and then make someone a homosexual? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny, and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions for people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church. To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike.
Hi, this is Lee Habib here. Do you wake up every morning dreading that first step out of bed because of foot pain? I know I used to. Living with plantar fasciitis felt like a constant battle. Then I tried Power Step, the number one podiatrist recommended in soles clinically proven to relieve pain. I was skeptical at first, but from the moment I put them in my shoes and sneakers, I felt the difference. Support and comfort exactly where I needed it and when I needed it, especially those really long walks I take each day with my wife. My foot pain vanished and even my back and knee pain was eased. Now I can go through my day pain-free. Go to PowerStep.com slash OAS and use code OAS for 15% off your first order.
That's PowerStep.com slash OAS and use code OAS for 15% off your first order. I have a way to make your morning more efficient. You can get caught up on the news in about seven minutes. That is my promise to you as the host of the seven podcast from the Washington Post. And in that time, I will run down seven stories, everything from the most important headlines to fascinating new information you might miss otherwise.
My name's Hannah Jewell. Go follow the seven right now, wherever you're listening and we will get you caught up. Hey, I'm here to tell you about Upfaith and Family, the leading streaming service for uplifting entertainment. This Christmas, cozy up with the ones you love and experience movies that inspire and bring people together. Watch Festival of Trees, where holiday competition leads to unexpected friendships or the heartwarming family movie, A Bluegrass Christmas. And don't miss our special virtual Christmas Fest event on Monday, November 25th. Meet stars from these movies like Aaron Bethea, Franco Lopresti, Emily Alitalo and Shawn Johnson as they answer fan questions live and share holiday memories. It's all commercial free and you can stream anywhere. Plus it's just a fraction of the cost of other services. Start your free trial today and experience the magic of Christmas.
Visit upfaithandfamily.com. And we return to Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Telling the story is Dr. Alan Gelzo, author of numerous books, including Lincoln and Douglas, The Debates and The And we return to Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Telling the story is Dr. Alan Gelzo, author of numerous books, including Lincoln and Douglas, The Debates That Defined America.
Let's return to the story. Well, if I were to give you the cliff notes version of the seven debates, I think we'd have to say that Lincoln starts slow and Douglas starts fast. This may be a little bit like calling the Kentucky Derby, but in the first debate at Ottawa, in other words, right out of the gate, Douglas is quick to pose embarrassing questions to Lincoln and Lincoln is hesitant and defensive. Now this begins to change slightly at Freeport, the site of the second debate, where it becomes Lincoln's turn to pose an even more damaging set of questions to Douglas.
The third debate at Jonesboro in the southern part of Illinois is probably the most lackluster and it was also the most poorly attended to. The basic reason for that being that Jonesboro was secure Douglas territory, it's when we swing up to the center of the state, to Charleston, that things really heat up because Charleston, sitting in the middle of the state, is in the middle of what I call the Whig Belt. The north of the state had been settled very largely by immigrants from the north and had a certain anti-slavery caste. Below that Whig Belt in the south, settlement mainly comes from Kentucky and the upper south and there's a general democratic pro-slavery flavor to things.
The swing counties and districts, so to speak, are the ones which used to vote Whig and there what's in the middle of the state and in the middle of those counties, in the middle of those districts is Charleston. And it's there that Lincoln at the fourth debate begins to assert his argument about the morality of slavery or rather the immorality of slavery. And from that point onward, Lincoln increasingly takes on the upper hand, strapping Douglas over the barrel of the Declaration of Independence and natural law and it didn't help Douglas that his robust oratorical style wore him out physically. So that by the time we get to the fifth debate at Galesburg, he's suffering from bronchitis and medicating himself with liquor, which shows. Whereas Lincoln, Lincoln is going straight through the seven debates like the Energizer Bunny.
Above all, Douglas made few changes in the speeches he gave. Lincoln on the contrary alters, improves, deepens his moral appeal against slavery until by the seventh debate at Quincy, he clearly has the upper hand. But he did not have the votes. Remember that this is a senatorial election and this occurs in a time when the state legislatures elected United States senators. What Lincoln and Douglas were really doing was campaigning among the people to elect state legislators who would when the new state legislature met in January of 1859, select one of them as US Senator. Now, if we judge purely by the votes cast for Republican state legislators, Lincoln should have had no trouble being selected for the Senate. It should have been the political upset of the 19th century. Of the 366,000 votes cast for the state legislature, 190,000 went to Republican candidates and only 166,000 to Douglas' Democrats.
If we judge it by that standard, Lincoln should have easily beaten Douglas. The problem is the state of Illinois' apportionment plan was out of date and unevenly favored the southernmost districts of the state, which were overwhelmingly Democratic. That meant they returned more state legislators to the state legislature than the middle or northern parts of the state did.
In fact, what they did was to return a Democratic majority to the state legislature. And in January of 1859, when the legislature meets, they give Douglas a 54 to 46 majority and he is reelected to the US Senate. Actually, Lincoln had this figured out the night of the vote itself.
As the returns were coming in, he could see the direction it was going. He saw the handwriting on the wall and it was a bitter, bitter disappointment to him because he really had done well, but the apportionment marched against him. The debates did two things, one of them practical and the other philosophical. And the practical thing is they made Lincoln nationally known. And up to this point, he had simply been a prominent Illinois Republican. And many people suspected that when he was selected as the favorite choice to run against Douglas, what the Republicans of Illinois were doing was admitting defeat and let's send a sacrificial lamb to the election feast. Lincoln did not look at it that way. He had been spoiling for a fight with Stephen A. Douglas for quite a while. And it never occurred to him that he might not win this or might not even be intended to win it. He went in to win and he shaped his responses in the debates with that in view. The debates made him a national figure. I mean, this is partially because technology comes to his assistance. The electrical telegraph had really only just been invented in the 1840s.
It's first put into use in 1844 by Samuel F. B. Morse. But by 1858, there are thousands of miles of telegraph wires strung all across the country. And it means that reports of the debates can be spread at lightning speed all across the nation.
And the process looks something like this. Lincoln would speak, a shorthand reporter would take down what was said. The shorthand transcript will be put into the hands of a galloper who immediately boarded the train to Chicago. In Chicago, the transcription is made, set into type, and by the next morning, the text of the debate is ready to be printed.
And from there, ready to be printed the next day and the day after in newspapers all across the country. People start out reading the text of these debates, mostly because they're interested in Douglas because he's the famous one. But as they read more and more of these debates, they are more and more interested in this man, Lincoln. This is what makes Lincoln someone talked about from Maine to Louisiana and Texas.
That, in turn, set him on the path for the invitation he received to speak in New York City before the Republican Party's East Coast leadership in February of 1860. And that, in turn, set him up for his nomination to the presidency in May of that year. So in practical terms, the Lincoln-Douglas debates are absolutely vital to making Lincoln a man who gets nominated for the presidency less than two years later.
But then there's the philosophical achievement of the debates. And that philosophical achievement is Lincoln's clear and unequivocal definition of the American experiment as the pursuit of natural rights as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. In February of 1861, after his election, but just before his inauguration, he would say in Independence Hall in Philadelphia that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn so far as I have been able to draw them from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall in which we stand. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that motivated the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland.
That would have been Douglas's answer. Rather, it was something in that declaration, giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time, which gave promise that in due time, the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all should have an equal chance. This, Lincoln said, this is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence. And he went on, and this is slightly eerie, he went on to add, rather than abandon those principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, I would rather be assassinated on the spot.
A little more than four years later, the body of Abraham Lincoln, assassinated, would lie in state in that same Independence Hall, and 300,000 people would file past to pay their respects. That guiding sentiment that he saw in the Declaration of Independence, that there would be hope for the world, that the weights should be lifted, that all should have an equal chance, that has been our guiding sentiment ever since. And the Lincoln-Douglas debates are the greatest commentary on it.
A special thanks to Dr. Alan Gelzo, the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates here on Our American Stories. I don't know if you know this, but when you don't have time to read The Washington Post, you can listen to it. Almost every article has a listening option. And right now, you can become a Washington Post subscriber for just 50 cents a week. It's an incredible deal. Stay on top of what's happening by signing up at washingtonpost.com slash pod.
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Whisper: medium.en / 2024-11-07 04:45:19 / 2024-11-07 05:04:24 / 19
