![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Reading the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Jul. 23rd, 2018 02:52 pmThe Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text edited by Harold Holzer
-My edition has this conceit that the opposition newspaper's transcript of the debate speeches is likely to be more accurate, for some reason. It presents the Democratic Chicago Times's account of Lincoln's speeches and the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune's account of Douglas's speeches, with brackets noting variances. There... honestly didn't seem like a lot of variances, and they didn't seem all that significant. We're not talking about sacred scripture where the lacunae have theological significance here. At best, the variant texts suggest that Lincoln was not as fluent a speaker as the canonical text of the debates suggests, but this is not all that surprising.
- I wanted to read the debates, in any case, for two reasons that are probably related. The first is that I was rewatching the West Wing Vinick-Santos debate, and they claim to be explicitly modeling themselves after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And I, having never read them, was curious if this was true. The second is my general anxiety about the nature of politics right now in America, and thus my curiosity about revisiting the history of American political debate. Which is probably the reason I was rewatching the West Wing, which is why I say they're related.
We were taught about the Lincoln-Douglas debates in history class, but never asked to actually read them, even in excerpt. Like many of the details of American history, they fall into the class of things I have opinions about in spite of a lack of direct encounter. When I discover such things, I tend to try to rectify the gaps.
-I think I have to conclude that the West Wing is misleading. It is true that both the Vinick-Santos debate and the Lincoln-Douglas debate had no rules except for timekeeping. But they're extremely different debates. Lincoln-Douglas consisted of seven three-hour debates. Vinick-Santos was forty five minutes. In Lincoln-Douglas, each speaker spoke individually for long stretches- an hour, followed by an hour and a half reply, followed by a return half hour rebuttal from the original speaker. There were no interruptions or challenges by the rival during a speaker's speech. In Vinick-Santos, the forty five minutes is a mostly good spirited back and forth full of interruptions and objections.
But beyond the form, there's a huge difference in substance. Vinick-Santos is a wide ranging debate where they actually argue a wide range of domestic political issues, with relatively little namecalling.
Lincoln-Douglas was 21 hours of name-calling and accusations of lying, all ostensibly focused on a single issue: slavery.
-Illinois's politics on slavery were complicated in 1858. It was a free state, and its Northern regions were full of support for abolitionism. But its Southern border was with slave states, and people in Southern Illinois moved freely between slave states and free states, and were thus more sympathetic to those wanting to preserve slavery. A politician in Illinois needed to figure out how to straddle this. And they needed to balance it while standing with a clear awareness that America was poised on the brink of a bloody civil war.
So Lincoln-Douglas is not a debate on abolition. Neither Lincoln nor Douglas is calling for abolition, and neither Lincoln nor Douglas is, at least explicitly, calling for the expansion of slavery. They're debating a narrower set of questions about slavery, which to modern ears can be tough to confront. It's tricky to admire this Lincoln the ambivalent, overtly racist champion of a moderate middle ground.
Douglas claims the ethnic superiority of whites over blacks, and asserts the right of white people to decide how to handle the black population with virtually no moral limitation. In Illinois, he says, we have chosen to ban slavery but refuse freemen the right to vote or be citizens. Other states have afforded the right to vote; Other states have enacted slavery. All are valid choices, he says. Ugh.
Lincoln asserts the ethnic superiority of whites over blacks, but nonetheless urges a moral imperative that blacks are still men, and deserve the inalienable Lockean natural rights to life and liberty so eloquently defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. That doesn't mean he wants them to be able to vote or be citizens, he just doesn't want them to be slaves. And he's willing to wait for emancipation to be a slow, drawn out process that could take as long as a century. Or so he says. In actual fact, he freed the slaves seven years later with the winning of the Civil War, so was he lying in 1858, or did he change his mind? Nobody really knows. Ugh.
A key for me in reconciling Lincoln is to remind myself of an idea that I want to frame very carefully about Lincoln's position in history. Not that he is 'a product of his times' in the sense that back then, more people were white supremacists and so that made it okay to be a white supremacist. Plenty of people back then were not white supremacists, it was possible to do and anyone who didn't should be criticized for it. But Lincoln and Douglas had a lived experience of institutionalized chattel slavery that basically nobody in America today has, and I think that's a thing to keep in mind. They knew slaves and former slaves, they knew slave owners and former slave owners. They knew the practical complexities of the institution in a way we can't understand when merely debating the abstract moral question of whether slavery is wrong. Slavery is wrong? So what? Societies must balance multiple conflicting wrongs. I wasn't living at the time and I couldn't possibly appreciate what it meant for a man like Lincoln to contemplate abolition.
That is quite an eloquent statement of doctrine. "We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it." Wow. Not quite #AbolishICE, is it? There is a class of person for whom "injustice" is intolerable and must be ended immediately. Too often, their solution is violence. Lincoln and Douglas and America paid for the entrenchment on the question of slavery in the form of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the Civil War. Was that evil greater than the lives held in bondage before the war, or the lives held in misery and abuse after by Jim Crow and white supremacy? Who can answer these questions? Standing in 1858, this is the substance of their debate: Which is the greater wrong, allowing slavery to stand or thrusting America into civil war? And if there was a third path, of allowing slavery to stand but placing it on the path of gradual elimination, is that better or worse?
I'm a moderate conservative and a devout Jew; I don't have always have a straight answer to that question, but my intuition is usually against mass violence and toward human liberty.
-What's both disappointing and simultaneously a little comforting about the debates is how little they actually debate slavery. I don't mean they debate other issues. Slavery is pretty literally the only political issue on the table, Douglas complains a few times about how back in the days of the Whigs, politics was about more than just a single all-consuming issue. But they don't debate slavery as a policy question or a moral question very much. Instead, the majority of the debate is mudslinging accusations and wild conspiracy theories designed to make their opponents look bad. It's disappointing in the sense that the Lincoln-Douglas debates are held up as this high water mark of great American political exchange, and the reality is not particularly highminded. It's comforting because our debate is not particularly highminded right now, and there's much talk about civility in debate, and it's comforting to have a reminder that it was never highminded.
Most of the conspiracy accusations remind one of the accusations against John Kerry the Flip Flopper. The nature of lawmaking is parsing fine distinctions in law that can make it easy for a propagandist to make it look like you stood on the wrong side of any contentious issue. Lincoln and Douglas's accusations consist of fine-toothed readings of the nuances of Congressional debate with an aim to make the lawmaker look like they're on the wrong side of an issue. Douglas and some of his Senate rivals debated a bill about Kansas statehood, for example. One of the abolitionist senators wanted to include language explicitly authorizing Kansas to ban slavery. Douglas felt this language unnecessarily duplicative of general language in the bill authorizing Kansas to do whatever the hell it wanted, but more importantly, knew that such language would threaten pro-slavery Democrats needed to pass the bill, so after trying and failing to add language authorizing Kansas to either ban or allow slavery, he removed the language completely from the bill. Lincoln then charges that Douglas was conspiring to make it impossible to ban slavery in Kansas, in coordination with arranging the Dred Scott decision with Justice Taney to make it impossible to completely ban slavery in a territory. There's not a lot of substance to either side of this issue, it's just gotcha politics, because the clause had very little legal meaning either way. The only reason these details of drafting history matter is because they have the potential to become campaign issues.
A few of the accusations are more serious. Lincoln accuses Douglas of corruption when he reformed the judicial system in Illinois, resulting in his own appointment as a judge. Douglas accuses Lincoln, then a Whig, of conspiring with Thomas Trumbull, a Democrat, to destroy both parties over the issue of slavery in exchange for their own political ascension to the Senate. Lincoln accuses Douglas of deliberately using falsified records of a past political convention as evidence of Lincoln's doubledealing. They fling these accusations at each other while standing next to each other on the stage. Civility? What civility?
-Douglas spends a lot of time accusing Lincoln of a particular sort of double-dealing, between North and South. He charges that Lincoln speaks a more egalitarian, abolitionist message in Northern Illinois than he does in Southern Illinois. Lincoln devotes a lot of energy to disputing this, but he makes the best point in its regard in the fifth debate: It would be stupid of him to do that kind of pandering, because everyone has access to newspapers. The people in Northern Illinois are going to read what he said in Southern Illinois.
This is 1858, the telegraph is twenty years old and has spread nation-wide. Lincoln and Douglas argue on a Tuesday and by Wednesday the whole nation knows what they said. This is a debate whose significance is driven by the new technology of the telegraph. It is an Illinois debate, but it's also a national debate. And that's a new thing and an important facet of the debate that Lincoln is well-aware of, and Douglas seems slightly less aware of. It's always interesting to look at how technology drives politics.
-It was a really illuminating read. Not at all what I expected, but my understanding of American politics feels slightly deeper than it was before.
-My edition has this conceit that the opposition newspaper's transcript of the debate speeches is likely to be more accurate, for some reason. It presents the Democratic Chicago Times's account of Lincoln's speeches and the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune's account of Douglas's speeches, with brackets noting variances. There... honestly didn't seem like a lot of variances, and they didn't seem all that significant. We're not talking about sacred scripture where the lacunae have theological significance here. At best, the variant texts suggest that Lincoln was not as fluent a speaker as the canonical text of the debates suggests, but this is not all that surprising.
- I wanted to read the debates, in any case, for two reasons that are probably related. The first is that I was rewatching the West Wing Vinick-Santos debate, and they claim to be explicitly modeling themselves after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And I, having never read them, was curious if this was true. The second is my general anxiety about the nature of politics right now in America, and thus my curiosity about revisiting the history of American political debate. Which is probably the reason I was rewatching the West Wing, which is why I say they're related.
Arnold Vinick: You know, I've watched every televised Presidential debate that this country has ever had. And every time I heard them recite the rules, I always thought that meant they're not going to have a real debate. When the greatest hero of my party, Abraham Lincoln debated, he didn't need any rules. He wasn't afraid of a real debate.
We were taught about the Lincoln-Douglas debates in history class, but never asked to actually read them, even in excerpt. Like many of the details of American history, they fall into the class of things I have opinions about in spite of a lack of direct encounter. When I discover such things, I tend to try to rectify the gaps.
-I think I have to conclude that the West Wing is misleading. It is true that both the Vinick-Santos debate and the Lincoln-Douglas debate had no rules except for timekeeping. But they're extremely different debates. Lincoln-Douglas consisted of seven three-hour debates. Vinick-Santos was forty five minutes. In Lincoln-Douglas, each speaker spoke individually for long stretches- an hour, followed by an hour and a half reply, followed by a return half hour rebuttal from the original speaker. There were no interruptions or challenges by the rival during a speaker's speech. In Vinick-Santos, the forty five minutes is a mostly good spirited back and forth full of interruptions and objections.
But beyond the form, there's a huge difference in substance. Vinick-Santos is a wide ranging debate where they actually argue a wide range of domestic political issues, with relatively little namecalling.
Lincoln-Douglas was 21 hours of name-calling and accusations of lying, all ostensibly focused on a single issue: slavery.
-Illinois's politics on slavery were complicated in 1858. It was a free state, and its Northern regions were full of support for abolitionism. But its Southern border was with slave states, and people in Southern Illinois moved freely between slave states and free states, and were thus more sympathetic to those wanting to preserve slavery. A politician in Illinois needed to figure out how to straddle this. And they needed to balance it while standing with a clear awareness that America was poised on the brink of a bloody civil war.
So Lincoln-Douglas is not a debate on abolition. Neither Lincoln nor Douglas is calling for abolition, and neither Lincoln nor Douglas is, at least explicitly, calling for the expansion of slavery. They're debating a narrower set of questions about slavery, which to modern ears can be tough to confront. It's tricky to admire this Lincoln the ambivalent, overtly racist champion of a moderate middle ground.
Douglas claims the ethnic superiority of whites over blacks, and asserts the right of white people to decide how to handle the black population with virtually no moral limitation. In Illinois, he says, we have chosen to ban slavery but refuse freemen the right to vote or be citizens. Other states have afforded the right to vote; Other states have enacted slavery. All are valid choices, he says. Ugh.
Lincoln asserts the ethnic superiority of whites over blacks, but nonetheless urges a moral imperative that blacks are still men, and deserve the inalienable Lockean natural rights to life and liberty so eloquently defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. That doesn't mean he wants them to be able to vote or be citizens, he just doesn't want them to be slaves. And he's willing to wait for emancipation to be a slow, drawn out process that could take as long as a century. Or so he says. In actual fact, he freed the slaves seven years later with the winning of the Civil War, so was he lying in 1858, or did he change his mind? Nobody really knows. Ugh.
A key for me in reconciling Lincoln is to remind myself of an idea that I want to frame very carefully about Lincoln's position in history. Not that he is 'a product of his times' in the sense that back then, more people were white supremacists and so that made it okay to be a white supremacist. Plenty of people back then were not white supremacists, it was possible to do and anyone who didn't should be criticized for it. But Lincoln and Douglas had a lived experience of institutionalized chattel slavery that basically nobody in America today has, and I think that's a thing to keep in mind. They knew slaves and former slaves, they knew slave owners and former slave owners. They knew the practical complexities of the institution in a way we can't understand when merely debating the abstract moral question of whether slavery is wrong. Slavery is wrong? So what? Societies must balance multiple conflicting wrongs. I wasn't living at the time and I couldn't possibly appreciate what it meant for a man like Lincoln to contemplate abolition.
Lincoln: I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong-we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong. We think it as a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that extends itself to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it. We have a due regard to the actual presence of it amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and all the Constitutional obligations thrown about it.
That is quite an eloquent statement of doctrine. "We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it." Wow. Not quite #AbolishICE, is it? There is a class of person for whom "injustice" is intolerable and must be ended immediately. Too often, their solution is violence. Lincoln and Douglas and America paid for the entrenchment on the question of slavery in the form of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the Civil War. Was that evil greater than the lives held in bondage before the war, or the lives held in misery and abuse after by Jim Crow and white supremacy? Who can answer these questions? Standing in 1858, this is the substance of their debate: Which is the greater wrong, allowing slavery to stand or thrusting America into civil war? And if there was a third path, of allowing slavery to stand but placing it on the path of gradual elimination, is that better or worse?
I'm a moderate conservative and a devout Jew; I don't have always have a straight answer to that question, but my intuition is usually against mass violence and toward human liberty.
-What's both disappointing and simultaneously a little comforting about the debates is how little they actually debate slavery. I don't mean they debate other issues. Slavery is pretty literally the only political issue on the table, Douglas complains a few times about how back in the days of the Whigs, politics was about more than just a single all-consuming issue. But they don't debate slavery as a policy question or a moral question very much. Instead, the majority of the debate is mudslinging accusations and wild conspiracy theories designed to make their opponents look bad. It's disappointing in the sense that the Lincoln-Douglas debates are held up as this high water mark of great American political exchange, and the reality is not particularly highminded. It's comforting because our debate is not particularly highminded right now, and there's much talk about civility in debate, and it's comforting to have a reminder that it was never highminded.
Most of the conspiracy accusations remind one of the accusations against John Kerry the Flip Flopper. The nature of lawmaking is parsing fine distinctions in law that can make it easy for a propagandist to make it look like you stood on the wrong side of any contentious issue. Lincoln and Douglas's accusations consist of fine-toothed readings of the nuances of Congressional debate with an aim to make the lawmaker look like they're on the wrong side of an issue. Douglas and some of his Senate rivals debated a bill about Kansas statehood, for example. One of the abolitionist senators wanted to include language explicitly authorizing Kansas to ban slavery. Douglas felt this language unnecessarily duplicative of general language in the bill authorizing Kansas to do whatever the hell it wanted, but more importantly, knew that such language would threaten pro-slavery Democrats needed to pass the bill, so after trying and failing to add language authorizing Kansas to either ban or allow slavery, he removed the language completely from the bill. Lincoln then charges that Douglas was conspiring to make it impossible to ban slavery in Kansas, in coordination with arranging the Dred Scott decision with Justice Taney to make it impossible to completely ban slavery in a territory. There's not a lot of substance to either side of this issue, it's just gotcha politics, because the clause had very little legal meaning either way. The only reason these details of drafting history matter is because they have the potential to become campaign issues.
A few of the accusations are more serious. Lincoln accuses Douglas of corruption when he reformed the judicial system in Illinois, resulting in his own appointment as a judge. Douglas accuses Lincoln, then a Whig, of conspiring with Thomas Trumbull, a Democrat, to destroy both parties over the issue of slavery in exchange for their own political ascension to the Senate. Lincoln accuses Douglas of deliberately using falsified records of a past political convention as evidence of Lincoln's doubledealing. They fling these accusations at each other while standing next to each other on the stage. Civility? What civility?
-Douglas spends a lot of time accusing Lincoln of a particular sort of double-dealing, between North and South. He charges that Lincoln speaks a more egalitarian, abolitionist message in Northern Illinois than he does in Southern Illinois. Lincoln devotes a lot of energy to disputing this, but he makes the best point in its regard in the fifth debate: It would be stupid of him to do that kind of pandering, because everyone has access to newspapers. The people in Northern Illinois are going to read what he said in Southern Illinois.
This is 1858, the telegraph is twenty years old and has spread nation-wide. Lincoln and Douglas argue on a Tuesday and by Wednesday the whole nation knows what they said. This is a debate whose significance is driven by the new technology of the telegraph. It is an Illinois debate, but it's also a national debate. And that's a new thing and an important facet of the debate that Lincoln is well-aware of, and Douglas seems slightly less aware of. It's always interesting to look at how technology drives politics.
-It was a really illuminating read. Not at all what I expected, but my understanding of American politics feels slightly deeper than it was before.