other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it
where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or
its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as
well as new, North as well as South [Emphasis Lincoln's.]The burden of the speech was a masterly summary of the legal and constitutional threats
represented by the Dred Scott decisions and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Lincoln challenged
Douglas-his main opponent in the state-to say clearly where he stood on both these issues.
Lincoln said of his speech: If I had to draw a pen across my record, and erase my whole life from sight, and if I had one poor gift or choice left as to what I should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it to the world unerased.' Lincoln was right to put his finger on Douglas, for he represented the spirit of compromise where it was no longer possible-where further attempts to evade the dread issue would play into the hands of the South and sell the pass. Lincoln objected strongly to Horace Greeley's plan to get Douglas into the Republican Party. He saw Douglas as an unprincipled man motivated solely by ambition. Eventually both North and South came round to Lincoln's view. But in 1858 Douglas was a much weightier politician than Lincoln, albeit a younger man. Only five feet high, but muscular and stocky, he was the son of a doctor but had done many things-laborer in his teens, a teacher at twenty, a lawyer at twenty-one, a state legislator and Secretary of State of Illinois, a judge of its supreme court, then a congressman, a senator before he was forty, a European traveler who had been received by the Tsar of Russia and the Queen of England, a rich man who had married two Southern heiresses. He traveled in princely fashion, by special train or coach, with a truck and field gun behind, which fired a salute when he arrived in any place he was due to speak. He drove to his engagements in a carriage with six horses and with thirty-two outriders. So Douglas was a grand man who looked down his nose at the uncouth Lincoln. But Lincoln was cunning when he wished to be. Annoyed by the conservative Springfield Journal, he persuaded it to publish an apology for Southern slavery and so ruined its reputation among right- thinking Illinois readers-it went out of business. Determined to get maximum publicity for his House Divided strategy, he provoked and teased and inveigled Douglas into giving him a series of public debates, from which Lincoln had everything to gain and very little to lose. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of seven encounters, August-October 1858, conducted throughout the state, with the Senate seat the prize. They were preceded and followed by bands and processions and attracted crowds of 10,000 or more, entire families traveling up to 30 miles to attend them. Both men were good debaters and they made a striking contrast of style, Douglas, meticulously dressed, exuding vigor, Lincoln shambling and awkward in word and gesture, then suddenly, without warning and for brief seconds, becoming godlike in his majestic passion. Douglas won the seat. But the debates eventually finished him, while they transformed Lincoln into a national figure. They were, also, an important process in educating the North in the real issues at stake, and this was of far greater historical importance than the Clay-Webster- Calhoun encounters of 1850. The strength of Douglas was his warning that the path Lincoln was treading could lead to sectional discord on a scale the country had never known, and possibly civil war. His weakness was that he was never really prepared to say where he stood on slavery and was thus exposed, in debate, as trying to be all things to all men. He said:I do not care whether the vote goes on for
or against slavery. That is only a question of dollars and cents. The Almighty himself has drawn
across this continent a line on one side of which the earth must be for ever tilled by slave labor,
whereas on the other side of that line labor is free.' Northerners might accept this-indeed had