Allen C. Guelzo: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 [Music] hi this is tony williams a senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and we are very pleased to bring you another episode of scholar talks and on this episode where we’re extremely honored to have our renowned scholar alan gelzo join us to speak about his book lincoln and douglas the debates that define america to be and and we’ll discuss elections and democratic rhetoric and national conversations and lots of interesting topics by way of introduction professor alan galzo is a senior research scholar in the council of the humanities at princeton university

0:46 and the director of the james madison programs initiative in politics and citizenship he’s the author and editor of a dozen best-selling books and i just happen to have a few of them i pulled from my library reconstruction and lincoln two books in the oxford very short introduction series redeeming the great emancipator which is part of the nathan huggins lecture series at harvard university also lincoln’s emancipation proclamation the end of slavery in america and i am delighted to show you uh allen you signed that for me when we met a few years back also abraham lincoln

1:33 redeemer president and finally gettysburg the last invasion uh alan i don’t have all dozen or so but i do have a lot of them he has uh won numerous awards too many to mention but of most note is probably the prestigious lincoln prize and incredible yet well deserved three times and he contributed to the bri textbook life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and is profoundly dedicated to civic education in a democracy his website is alangelzo.com and alan you’re one of my favorite historians and i want to sincerely thank

2:19 you for joining me well tony thank you very much for that introduction i’m uh always happy to talk about abraham lincoln and especially about the great debates that he participated in with stephen a douglas in the momentous year of 1858 so if you have questions i will try to provide answers great i i do have questions for you so uh let’s go ahead and get started so by way of some historical background i i think it seems fair to say that the kansas nebraska act was part of a series of events including bleeding kansas the dred scott case uh the national debate generally over the expansion of slavery that that abraham lincoln and stephen douglas were really on a trajectory

3:05 uh towards that that senate race in 1858 and the president presidential race of 1860 can you give us some sense of how those all those national events brought these two together 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

3:51 confusion but he said we rose each fighting grasping whatever he could first reach a sigh the pitchfork a chopping axe 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 but in order to understand why the kansas nebraska act was important in this mix why it was the

4:37 catalyst for so much that happens you have to understand that 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

5:23 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 uh under the terms of the missouri compromise slavery would remain penned in where it was in 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 of 1846 to 48 added the modern southwest uh arizona

6:09 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

6:54 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 estates this is what douglas called popular sovereignty in other words let the people in the territories decide their own future

7:41 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 declarations announcement that all men are created equal and are endeared 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

8:27 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 heft in 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 very good and so these lincoln douglas

9:13 debates seem a far cry from today’s banalities uh in our own presidential debates and they had an incredible one hour opening an hour and a half response a half hour rebuttal and just this very interesting carnival-like democratic atmosphere thousands came out to see these debates and you call them in your book the preeminent examples of political discourse in the 19th century how did they contribute uh how how did and how did they represent that vibrant 19th century democracy well they represented first of all

9:59 simply by the way they were carried on i mean it is remarkable when you think about it comparing the kinds of things that are called presidential debates today which really 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 hour three hours on their feet talking non-stop 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

10:46 very important part of that political life because debating really had a 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 uh 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 slave holding in itself sinful and the relation between master

11:31 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 free thinker 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 bow ideal of a statesman in those days every small town seemed to

12:19 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 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

13:05 uh the debaters simply took turns standing up and speaking to the question at issue there were debating manuals like james mcgilligan’s the american debater of 1855 and burley’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

13:52 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 too to be the goal of getting them transcribed by shorthand reporters 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

14:37 putting on a dramatic performance sequential speech debating translated into very lively political reading matter something which modern academic style debating really does not do the carnival atmosphere the carnival atmosphere of the debates is something we don’t really expect from lincoln and douglas we sometimes expect as we’re going to 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

15:23 right at the end of the campaign the banners the crowds held up uh 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 and you’re right that in the lincoln douglas debates the two men had quote radically different notions of what democratic politics really is so can you help explain the difference of douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine which he had alluded to earlier and lincoln’s more natural rights republican kind of view

16:10 well i think it is true that lincoln and douglas in these debates really represent two divergent ideas about democracy which was 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 decide all questions purely on the grounds of being a majority and without respect to theories of political right or

16:58 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

17:44 and the results were irrelevant douglas in fact bought at dragging morality into political questions because he feared how 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 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 majority should be allowed to decide certain

18:30 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 we’re operating on the wrong principles process versus principles

19:16 in the end run the lincoln debates is lincoln douglas debaser about which is going to predominate in american political life right and you mentioned uh the issue of slavery and uh we’re speaking about majority rule and natural rights and and principles and morality so so lincoln and douglas had very different views on slavery which are closely linked to their views of the declaration of independence to natural rights and even to democracy as you’re saying can you explain that difference on slavery for stephen douglas the declaration of independence was a historical artifact not not a universal aspiration

20:02 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

20:48 basis i believe it was made 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 etc but simply meant that the english were born equal and endowed by their creator with

21:34 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 its declaration of equality of natural rights among all nations is correct for lincoln the declaration was as he put it his ancient faith and he said in 1854 it teaches me that all men are created equal and that there can be no moral right in

22:19 connection with one man’s making a slave of another anything which produced slavery whether it was popular sovereignty or some other political invention 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 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

23:06 it is the same tyrannical principle constant universal of application all around the world very good so related to the topic of slavery is the issue of race and lincoln is often taken to task for statements about race in the debates while douglas was a clear race vader calling lincoln the pejoratives black republican black abolitionists and warning that that lincoln was for an amalgamation of the races and the social civic political equality of blacks can you help us make sense of their views on race and what rhetorical purposes they might

23:52 have served in the debates well tony 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

24:39 two races living together on terms of social and political equality now listening to that with the ears of 2020 it is damaging it makes him sound like a white supremacist the longtime editor of ebony magazine the late larone bennett whom i knew grew up in segregated mississippi and was astonished as a young man to read those words and in some sense bennett never recovered from it and he spent years afterward attacking lincoln as a hypocrite and black people as foolish for admiring lincoln

25:24 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 immoral 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

26:10 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

26:56 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 precisely because unlike natural rights social and political rights do not define our humanity possessing some social and political rights and not possessing other social and political rights does not make us less human or less equal i mean for instance we don’t give ten-year-olds the right to vote but that

27:44 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 a much less 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

28:30 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 it’s not a natural right it’s a social or political right 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

29:16 provocative that frankly tony i can’t repeat it here any more than i could repeat the language of the drunken sailor 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

30:02 and political equality douglas claimed at ottawa we have provided that the negro shall not be a slave and we have 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 there is a porousness in the line between natural rights and social and political rights which allows movement from the natural side to penetrate into the domain on the social and political side

30:49 and in the civil war lincoln confirmed that lincoln demonstrated precisely that movement by advocating in 1864 the first award of voting rights to black americans douglas might have been wrong about a lot of other things but he saw very clearly that the moment the concession is made of equal natural rights then further on down the road there is going to be that movement towards the equality of social and political rights lincoln understood that douglas understood that whether they wanted to admit it in 1858 that’s another practical political question but by the time we move into the civil war the answer has become much more obvious

31:35 what’s the outcome of these debates and the uh run for the senate in 1858 well if i were to give you the cliff notes version of the seven debates and chart their course over the series themselves 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

32:21 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 of the seven debates and it was also the most poorly attended too the basic reason for that being that jonesboro was secure douglas territory and so there was less urgency on the part of people to hear the two candidates messages it’s when we swing up to the center of the state to charleston for the fourth debate that things really begin to heat up because charleston sitting in the middle of the state is in the middle of what i

33:07 call the whig belt the north of the state counties to the north the districts to the north were had been settled very largely by immigrants from the north and had a certain anti-slavery cast below that wig 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 the swing counties and districts so to speak are the ones which used to vote wig and they’re 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

33:52 assert his argument about the morality of slavery or rather the immorality of slavery and from that point onward through the fifth debate at galesburg the sixth debate at alton and the final debate at quincy on october 15th 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

34:38 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 he had more or less the same thing to say at each debate 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

35:24 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 u.s senator so no one no one was actually voting in november of 1858 for either lincoln or douglas rather they were voting for their state legislative surrogates now if we judge purely by the votes cast for republican state legislators lincoln should have had no trouble being

36:10 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 thousands of douglass’s democrats so lincoln if we judge it by that standard lincoln should have easily beaten douglas the problem is the state of 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

36:57 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 re-elected to the u.s senate actually lincoln had had this figured out the night of the vote itself as the returns were coming in he could see the direction it was going it wasn’t that he waited until january to find out by the night by election night in november of 1858 he saw the handwriting on the wall and and it was a bitter bitter disappointment to him because he really had done well in these

37:43 debates he had done well in this overall campaign but the apportionment marched against him and you’re right that lincoln defended the possibility that there could be a moral core to a democracy and that he insisted that quote liberal democracy had a higher purpose how did that view shape lincoln’s statesmanship and particularly his time as president after 1860 what you see in the shape of lincoln’s statesmanship is a constant and consistent appeal to the principles of the american revolution and especially the principles of the declaration of independence

38:29 and you see it in its clearest form when he comes to gettysburg in november of 1863 to dedicate the soldiers national cemetery for the union soldiers who had fallen in the great battle that took place there in the preceding july he sets up in the gettysburg address this picture of american history he takes us back to 1776 score and seven years ago he says our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal now from that point he’ll immediately transition to say now

39:18 we’re met on a great battlefield we’re in in this civil war we’re met on this battlefield to dedicate a cemetery and from there he’ll pivot yet again by the time he gets to the close of his address by saying we really can’t dedicate we really can’t hallow we really can’t consecrate this ground it’s already been consecrated by those who are buried here rather we must consecrate ourselves for the future to that great task that they were dedicated to so that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth what he does in the gettysburg address is this three-fold movement through time past what we’re doing here in the

40:03 present what we should be doing in the future and it’s all tied together by that dedication to that proposition and what a remarkable statement that is other nations have been founded upon ethnicity upon religion upon race upon language the american republic is founded on a proposition think about that in the long context of human politics and human history nothing might seem to be more feeble than the idea of founding a nation founding a state on something as arid and rationalistic as a proposition

40:50 and yet lincoln could turn around and point to the row upon row of graves there at gettysburg as the evidence that there were ordinary americans who had seen something dramatic remarkable desirable worth dying for in that proposition so that no matter if monarchs and princes and dukes and counts and despots of various sorts could look at the american experiment and say well how can you find found how can you find a nation on a proposition they who had fought at gettysburg had demonstrated that yes you can do that

41:35 and this is what the american republic is founded on in that constant appeal to the propositions of the declaration of independence lincoln was doing something that people today don’t always grasp very easily he was taking us back to our bedrock he was taking us back to our first principles today we’re not sure that we believe in first principles today we believe that we’re constantly moving forward and developing into something new at each point and we have no idea where we’re going but we’ll somehow go there and we’ll stumble into whatever the future opens up for us and somehow muddle through that’s not what the

42:21 gettysburg address was about the gettysburg address was let’s go back to our fundamental proposition the proposition that we were dedicated to at the beginning let’s constantly go back to that and constantly build and rebuild and rebuild some more on that basis we do not need to discover another basis we do not need to discover a future we will find our future in our past what we are is what we were and if we will build on what we were then the present that we will occupy will continue to be full of the same

43:08 promise that moved those men who dedicated themselves offered their lives at gettysburg and that lincoln said if we will be guided by that that is what will preserve government of the people by the people and for the people there is a bright line that you draw from the argument he is making in the lincoln douglas debates to the statement that he is making at gettysburg and in that bright line there is a constant recurring to first principles we don’t often do that today we don’t often believe we should do that because we tend to think that the past was the past and the past is dead well the past is not dead the past is

43:53 full of living testimony in that respect history is the democracy of the dead it’s giving the dead something they don’t normally have which is a voice in how we live today but is that not democracy it certainly is in the widest sense what lincoln is calling upon us to do is to re-embrace those principles and if we do lincoln said many years before that if we do we will wash the garments of our republic white in the blood of the revolution and we will experience a new birth of freedom that was the genius of lincoln’s statesmanship one more question you write that the

44:41 great debates really are a defining moment in the development of a liberal democracy how did these lincoln douglas debates shape our own democracy in the 19th century and perhaps briefly what what lessons can help our own divided society today help restore our common identity as americans our civil conversation are a national debate well tony the debates did two things one of them practical and the other philosophical 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

45:28 against douglas what the republicans of illinois were doing was admitting defeat and you know let’s let’s send a sacrificial lamb uh to the election feast uh 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 now 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

46:15 morse but by 1858 there are thousands of miles of telegraph wire 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 looked something like this lincoln would speak a shorthand reporter would take down what was said the copy the transcript the shorthand transcript will be put into the hands of a 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

47:00 ready to be printed the next day and the day after in newspapers all across the country uh 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 and the arguments that he is laying out before douglas so the telegraph douglas the whole debating process this is what makes lincoln someone talked about from maine to louisiana and texas something he had not a prominence he had not enjoyed before that in turn set him on the path for the invitation he received to speak in new york city

47:46 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

48:31 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 now he went on to expand on those sentiments he said 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 he said the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland

49:16 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

50:02 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 dr alan galzo i want to thank you for

50:49 spending some time with us today and for your contribution to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and and all you do for the bill of rights institute thank you very much tony it was a pleasure to be able to talk about abraham lincoln our viewers can uh again uh visit alangelso.com and they can also come to bill of rights institute.org for more information about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness thank you for joining us you