The Lincoln Douglas Debates

     Henry Clay Roberts was my great grand father and a private soldier in the Confederate Army. It is ironic that he was named for the famous senator from Kentucky who crafted the Missouri Compromise, and that the abrogation of that compromise would propel Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and precipitate the Civil War. With President’s Day coming I’ve been reading up on Lincoln and thinking what I might learn from that unlikely hero. I had forgotten, really, what the famous debates were all about. Since the debates first brought Lincoln to national prominence they are a good place to start. At the time Lincoln wasn’t even running for office. He was just a country lawyer who felt strongly about the great issue of the day, slavery and whether it would tear the Union apart.
     First the compromise; everybody knew slavery was an abomination, including most southerners, but economies in southern states were dependent on it. Everybody also understood that, as the Union grew, adding new states without slavery would cause the institution to wither. Bringing them in as slave would prolong it. That’s what the argument was all about for most people. Abolitionists, those who wanted slavery ended immediately, were always a small minority. It’s hard for us to understand this reasoning today but most anti-slavery advocates in the early 19th century thought slavery was a necessary evil. If the constitution hadn’t allowed it there would be no Union. So in 1820 the compromise, for the sake of preserving the Union, was that Missouri would be slave but slavery would not be allowed in territories north of a line extending from Missouri’s southern border.
     The compromise was never an easy one and over the next 30 years it was chipped away at, mostly in favor of new slave territory. When Kansas and Nebraska applied for statehood in 1854 Steven Douglas, a senator from Illinois, offered a bill to let voters in the new states decide for themselves whether to be slave or free. With southern senators threatening to secede the Nebraska bill narrowly passed. It caused a furor back home in Illinois and for Lincoln it was the last straw. He spent weeks preparing a speech. Douglas came to the state fair in Springfield and spoke for three hours defending his bill. The next day Lincoln offered a rebuttal. It was the speech of his life. Newspapers across the country printed it and Lincoln was famous, at a stroke the leading spokesman in opposition to allowing slavery in places where it did not already exist.
     Lincoln’s genius was in addressing a moral issue in terms that did not cast his opponents in terms of evil. He appealed to their own sense of right and wrong, reminding them of the words in the Declaration of Independence, of why they had agreed to ban the Atlantic slave trade, asking them why those who still ran slave markets in the south were universally despised, pointing out that southern slave owners had already freed over 400,000 slaves at serious financial sacrifice to themselves. Why would they do these things if slavery weren’t wrong? He pleaded with them not to add it to the new territories.
     It was too late. The die was cast, but Lincoln’s capacity for empathy, his ability to place himself in another’s shoes, had emerged as his signal personal attribute. He understood that when you begin by calling your opponent a scoundrel, any discussion is already ended. It was one of the things that made him the greatest of our presidents. We could use more of that.