Abraham Lincoln’s arguments against slavery in his first debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois, would make him a national figure.
A child stands in front of statues of Abraham Lincoln, left, and Stephen A. Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois. The park is where they first debated.
Lincoln would not have the first word — as the incumbent, Douglas got the initial opening speech — but he would have the crowd. Ottawa lay in the Third Congressional District, represented by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, brother of the Alton newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy, whose 1837 lynching at the hands of a pro-slavery mob Lincoln had condemned before the Springfield Lyceum.
The first stone belonged to Douglas, though, and he used it to attack Lincoln with what even he later admitted was a falsehood. Douglas began his opening speech by hearkening to the days when there had been two national parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, both equally devoted to the principle of allowing the states and the territories to decide for themselves the slavery question.
Yet Douglas proceeded as though Lincoln had organized the meeting and drafted its platform, which dedicated the Republican Party to repealing the Fugitive Slave Law, prohibiting the admission of new slave states, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and excluding slavery from the territories. In fact, Lincoln endorsed only the last measure.
Douglas was never known to insult Lincoln personally. Lincoln’s first impression of Douglas from their Vandalia days was that he was “the least man I ever saw,” and he often made wisecracks about his rival’s stature, his dishonesty and his excessive drinking. Some of this had to do with their political fortunes: Lincoln envied Douglas’s success, while Douglas had little reason to take note of Lincoln, at least not until 1858. Some had to do with their attitude toward politics itself.
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