Week 3
THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, 1858
The most famous debates in American political history focused almost exclusively on the issue that divided Americans most bitterly and threatened the very integrity of their nation: slavery. Douglas defended his doctrine of popular sovereignty: he endorsed the decision of the citizens of Illinois to abolish slavery in their own state, but argued that what the people of other states and territories decided to do about slavery was their own business. He accused Lincoln, no longer a Whig, of being a "black Republican" who placed the interests of black slaves and his own political aspirations above the integrity of the Union. He backed Lincoln into a corner and forced him to declare himself in some respects at least a white supremacist. Lincoln fought back by attacking not only Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty but also the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of the previous year, which stated that no black person could be a citizen, that owning slaves was an inviolable right of property, and that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had violated the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against taking property without due process. If slave ownership was a constitutionally protected property right, how could territorial settlers legally exclude slavery? The Court, he said, had watered down Douglas's popular sovereignty doctrine until it was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." Douglas replied that the people of a territory could override the Supreme Court by refusing to pass a slave code, but Lincoln pointed out that if this "lawless" doctrine were accepted then abolitionists by the same logic could refuse to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Lincoln, in other words, showed that Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty and Chief Justice Taney's decision that the Constitution endorsed slavery as an inviolable right of property, were logically incompatible with each other. But Lincoln went further, and deeper. Did Douglas deny that black slaves were human beings? Did he maintain that they had no rights at all? Lincoln famously argued that although all men were not created equal in every respect, they were equal in at least one respect: that they were entitled to a share in the fruits of their own labor. Conceding that the African American was "perhaps" not the equal of the white American in some respects, he insisted that in the right to put into his mouth the bread that he had earned with his own hands, he is the equal of every other man.
Bruce Thompson