This Week in History

October 4-10, 1858

Lincoln Exposes Douglas's Sophistry on the Issue of Slavery

The seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas during the U.S. Senate campaign of 1858, known today as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, dealt overwhelmingly with the effects of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott Decision. But each debate had a slightly different focus, and the one at Galesburg, Ill. on Oct. 7 was memorable for Lincoln's ability to reveal the inconsistencies in Douglas's arguments, and the intentions behind the constant sophistries which Douglas employed.

Douglas was a slippery orator who would speak for hours, but never directly answer Lincoln's questions. What Lincoln aimed at, was to make both his and the Senator's actual policies crystal clear, even if the Senator would not, so that citizens could easily choose between them. And it was not just the voters of Illinois that Lincoln was talking to. Lincoln's view was that when most Americans saw clearly what the choices were, the looming danger to the nation might be averted.

Senator Douglas always stated that the words in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal," was never intended to apply to the Negro. Douglas claimed that he did not care whether slavery existed or not; it was of no concern to him, and certainly not a moral issue. What he did provide for dealing with this "problem" was what he called "popular sovereignty," the supposed right of a state or territory to regulate slavery as it pleased. Despite the overwhelming evidence contained in the drive to bring slavery to America's new territories, and the national legislation and Supreme Court decisions which presaged making slavery legal in all states, Douglas maintained that a new territory could use "popular sovereignty" to keep out slavery.

He put it this way to the citizens of Galesburg: "Chief Justice [Roger] Taney has said, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, that a Negro slave being property, stands on an equal footing with other property, and that the owner may carry them into United States territory the same as he does other property. Suppose any two of you, neighbors, should conclude to go to Kansas, one carrying $100,000 worth of Negro slaves and the other $100,000 worth of mixed merchandise, including quantities of liquors. You both agree that under that decision you may carry your property to Kansas, but when you get it there, the merchant who is possessed of the liquors is met by the Maine liquor law, which prohibits the sale or use of his property, and the owner of the slaves is met by equally unfriendly legislation, which makes his property worthless after he gets it there.

"What is the right to carry your property into the territory worth to either, when unfriendly legislation in the territory renders it worthless after you get it there? The slaveholder when he gets his slaves there finds that there is no local law to protect him in holding them, no slave code, no police regulation maintaining and supporting him in his right, and he discovers at once that the absence of such friendly legislation excludes his property from the territory, just as irresistibly as if there was a positive constitutional prohibition excluding it.

"Thus you find it is with any kind of property in a territory, it depends for its protection on the local and municipal law. If the people of a territory want slavery, they make friendly legislation to introduce it, but if they do not want it, they withhold all protection from it, and then it cannot exist there." This sanguine view, of course, did not comment on the still-recent events in "Bleeding Kansas," where the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution had been stuffed down the throats of the anti-slavery settlers.

The firepower for enforcing this decision had been provided by heavy funding to gun-toting, pro-slavery forces imported from Missouri. Less than two months before the Galesburg debate, the majority of Kansas settlers had finally succeeded, despite the murders of Free-State men at Lawrence, in rejecting the pro-slavery constitution and had come into the Union as a free state.

Lincoln avoided the controversy over Kansas, but deftly pointed out the fallacies in Douglas's argument: "The Judge [Douglas had been an Illinois Supreme Court judge] has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted that Negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that instrument, to suppose that Negroes were meant therein; and he asked you: Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the Negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them?

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