Civil War Causes - The Election of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln - Douglass Debates 1858
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of formal political debates between the challenger, Abraham Lincoln, and the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, in a campaign for one of Illinois' two United States Senate seats. Although Lincoln lost the election, these debates launched him into national prominence which eventually led to his election as President of the United States.
Lincoln and Douglas agreed to debate in seven of the nine Illinois Congressional Districts; the seven where Douglas had not already spoken. In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour address. The other would then speak for an hour and a half. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal. In the seven debates, Douglas, as the incumbent, was allowed to go first four times.
Douglas and the Freeport Doctrine
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 to link him with leading abolitionists like Frederick Douglass.
Lincoln attacked Douglas for his support of the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which denied citizenship to all Black people, enslaved or free, and accused him of seeking to make slavery legal throughout the United States. In the second debate, on August 27 in Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas whether or not popular sovereignty allowed settlers to exclude slavery from a territory before it joined the Union. Douglas said yes, clarifying that territories could choose not to enforce Dred Scott by withholding protection for slaveholders under local law. Known as the Freeport Doctrine, this stance alienated many Southerners and would come back to haunt Douglas during his 1860 presidential run.
Douglas backed the idea (common to Jacksonian Democrats) that power was best exercised at the local level. By contrast, Lincoln argued that only the federal government had the power to abolish slavery.
Differing Views on Race
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 introduce political and social equality between the white and the Black races” and that “a physical difference between the two” would likely prevent them from ever living in “perfect equality.” Though he believed slavery was morally wrong, Lincoln made it clear that he shared the belief in white supremacy held by Douglas and nearly all-white Americans at the time.
But while Douglas held that the nation’s founding document had been written by white men, who intended it to apply only to white men, Lincoln argued that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.” Though he assured Southerners he did not plan to interfere with slavery where it already existed, he argued that the Founding Fathers—many of whom enslaved people—had regarded the institution of slavery as a moral evil that must eventually disappear.
Impact of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
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. This was because each state legislatures appointed the senators from each state before the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913 which allowed for direct election of senators by the voters of each state. The results of this amendment today, limits the states check on power in Congress since a state would have the ability to recall their senator if they didn't believe they would vote in the best interest of the state and/or the people of that state.
Despite his loss, Lincoln’s commanding performance in the debates with Douglas, and his eloquent and bold statement of the Republican Party’s position on slavery, established him as a figure of national importance. Over the next two years, he would hone his arguments on the morality of slavery in speeches around the country, emerging as the dark horse Republican nominee in the 1860 presidential election.
Meanwhile, Douglas’ Democratic Party continued to split over the issue of slavery’s extension. Douglas succeeded in winning the Democratic nomination in 1860, but with Southern Democrats backing John Breckenridge, he won only one state: Missouri. Exhausted by the campaign, as well as his efforts to rally northern Democrats to the Union cause as the Civil War began, Douglas died in June 1861, at the age of 48.
The Presidential Election of 1860
None of the 1860 presidential candidates did anywhere near the level of campaigning seen in modern-day elections. In fact, except for Douglas, they mostly kept to themselves and let well-known party members and citizens campaign for them at rallies and parades. Much of the campaigning, however, was devoted to getting voters to the ballot box on Election Day.
Lincoln’s political experience and speeches spoke for themselves, but one of his main campaign goals was to keep the Republican party unified. He didn’t want his party to reveal any of the discord of the Democrats and hoped to divide the Democratic votes.
Douglas campaigned in the North and South to hopefully make up for the divided voter base in the South, and gave a series of campaign speeches in favor of the Union.
Election Day, 1860
On November 6, 1860, voters went to the ballot box to cast their vote for President of the United States. Lincoln won the election in an electoral college landslide with 180 electoral votes, although he secured less than 40 percent of the popular vote.
The North had many more people than the South and therefore control of the Electoral College. Lincoln dominated the Northern states but didn’t carry a single Southern state.
Douglas received some Northern support—12 electoral votes—but not nearly enough to offer a serious challenge to Lincoln. The Southern vote was split between Breckenridge who won 72 electoral votes and Bell who won 39 electoral votes. The split prevented either candidate from gaining enough votes to win the election.
The election of 1860 firmly established the Democratic and Republican parties as the majority parties in the United States. It also confirmed deep-seated views on slavery and states’ rights between the North and South.
Before Lincoln’s inauguration, eleven Southern states had seceded from the Union. Weeks after his swearing-in, the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War.
Video
