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By the summer of 1858, however, Lincoln had emerged as the standard-bearer of the new Illinois Republican Party. In the election of that year, he ran again for the Senate, challenging the incumbent, Stephen Douglas (1813–1861), the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to a series of debates.
The debates begin. Less than a month later, on August 21, 1858, Lincoln and Douglas climbed to a wooden platform in Ottawa’s downtown to launch the series of seven debates that each hoped would propel him to election as senator in November. The music and parades of the morning and early afternoon had ended, and the political banners were put ...
Lincoln was the clear underdog when he became Douglas’s Republican opponent in the 1858 Senate race. Before the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures selected United States senators. Douglas and Lincoln competed to obtain legislators who would be pledged to vote for them. Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates. Douglas agreed ...
The Lincoln–Douglas debates were a series of seven debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides that senators shall be ...
- 54 [a]
- Democratic
- Stephen A. Douglas
- 166,374 [37] [b]
- Background and Context For The Debates
- Seven Debates, Seven Congressional Districts
- Douglas and The Freeport Doctrine
- Differing Views on Race
- Impact of The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
- Sources
As the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas was one of the most prominent politicians in the country and seen as a future presidential contender. The controversial 1854 law repealed the Missouri Compromiseand established the doctrine of popular sovereignty, by which each new territory joining the Union would decide for itself whether to be...
Lincoln and Douglas met in seven debates between August and October 1858, located in different congressional districts around the state. In all, they traveled over 4,000 miles during the Senate campaign. While Lincoln traveled by railroad, carriage or boat, Douglas rode in a private train fitted with a cannon that fired a shot every time he arrived...
Aside from the physical contrast—Lincoln was tall, lanky and rumpled; Douglas short, stocky and dressed in expensive suits—the two men represented starkly opposing viewpoints on the issues at hand. From their first debate on August 21 in Ottawa, Douglas accused Lincoln of running on a radically antislavery “Black Republican” platform and attempted ...
Douglas repeatedly attacked Lincoln’s supposed radical views on race, claiming his opponent would not only grant citizenship rights to freed slaves but allow Black men to marry white women (an idea that horrified many white Americans) and that his views would put the nation on an inevitable path to war. Lincoln responded that he had “no purpose to ...
In the elections held in November 1858, Lincoln and other Republican candidates won 53 percent of the popular vote statewide. But the congressional districts represented in the Illinois legislature at the time favored the Democrats, and the state legislature chose to return Douglas to the Senate. Despite his loss, Lincoln’s commanding performance i...
Fergus M. Bordewich, “How Lincoln Bested Douglas in Their Famous Debates.” Smithsonian, September 2008. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery(W.W. Norton, 2010) Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln(Simon & Schuster, 2005)
Oct 20, 2004 · The small, energetic, and buoyant Douglas had earned popularity and a secure Senate seat in recent years while Lincoln—brooding, melancholic, vulgar in speech, and awkwardly tall—had stagnated ...
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Mar 26, 2016 · Explore Book Buy On Amazon. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen Douglas to a series of seven debates as part of their race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. It was a classic confrontation. Douglas, the incumbent, was barely 5 feet tall, with a big head made larger by his pompadour hairstyle. He was resplendent in finely tailored suits ...
