Abraham Lincoln - Political Debates
November 12th, 2007 by Bauman
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” - Abraham Lincoln
Running as a little-known candidate for the Illinois senatorship in 1858, Lincoln challenged incumbent and Democratic leader Stephen Douglas to a series of debates. Douglas had been responsible for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which contained a provision that the question of slavery should be decided by the territorial settlers themselves. In contrast to Douglas’ “popular Sovereignty” stance, Lincoln held that the United States could not survive as half-slave and half-free states.
The result was a memorable chain of lively arguments in front of cheering crowds. In the seventh and final debate, Lincoln cast the struggle to do away with slavery as the “struggle between two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time…. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’”
Though Lincoln lost the senatorial race, he assiduously compiled and preserved the texts of the debates himself and had them published in advance of the presidential election of 1860, during which he defeated a split Democratic party. Browse our Lincoln selection.