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Preparing for the debate.

It is the summer of 1854.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s bill to allow the people of Kansas and Nebraska, rather than the federal government, to decide whether slavery will be permitted in their region has become law.

Stephen A. Douglas

The law is an expression of “popular sovereignty.”

It negates the antislavery provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited the expansion of slavery in lands of the Louisiana Purchase above the 36th parallel of latitude.

1856

And the law ignites long-simmering sectional divisions between North and South.

Slavery’s opponents are enraged.

‘It bars Congress from upholding the Constitution,’ they claim.

Lincoln’ Springfield law office, where he worked after returning from his single term in Congress, was on the third floor of a brick building on the corner of Sixth and Adams Streets, as indicated with the “X.”

And it brings Lincoln back into politics after a five-year hiatus.

He will debate Douglas on three occasions in September and October 1854.

We have notes which Lincoln wrote in preparation for those debates.

In them, we see the concise, lawyerly argument which Lincoln used to refute Douglas’s position.

"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave A?

You say A is white, and B is black. It is color then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own.

You do not mean color exactly? You mean the white are intellectually the superior of the blacks; and therefore have the right to enslave them? take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own.

But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you."

Listening to Lincoln’s speech was transformative, said a newspaper reporter.

It convinced all who heard it that no man has the right to enslave another.

Said the reporter, ‘It was like listening to the Biblical preaching of the ancient Hebrew prophets.’

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda