Period_7

=== ﻿ ﻿ Before the debates, lincoln said that douglas was encouraging fears of amalgamation of the races with enough success to drive thousands of people away from the Republican Party.Douglas tried to convince, especially the Democrats, that Lincoln was an abolitionist for saying that the American Declaration of Independence applied to blacks as well as whites. Lincoln called a self-evident truth "the electric cord ... that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together."//===

Lincoln argued in his House Divided Speech that Douglas was part of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery. Lincoln said that ending the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in Kansas and Nebraska was the first step in this direction, and that the Dred Scott decision was another step in the direction of spreading slavery into Northern territories. Lincoln expressed the fear that the next Dred Scott decision would make Illinois a slave state.

Both Lincoln and Douglas had opposition. Although Lincoln was a former Whig, the prominent former Whig Judge Theophilus Lyle Dickey said that Lincoln was too closely tied to the abolitionists, and supported Douglas. But Democratic President James Buchanan opposed Douglas for defeating the Lecompton Constitution, and set up a rival National Democratic party that drew votes away from him.

Lincoln and Douglas each exaggerated the extremism of the other. Lincoln was more moderate than the abolitionists, and Douglas defeated a southern attempt to use vote fraud to have Kansas admitted as a slave state. With the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a similar situation prevails. At the macro level, we can see that Lincoln could not have been nominated, let alone elected president in 1860, if he had not gained national attention two years earlier as the debate opponent of Douglas, a man with a huge national reputation and who was on track to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic party. Since Lincoln subsequently defeated Douglas for the presidency in 1860, the debates are, by definition, important historical events. Lincoln had earned the right to confront Douglas by attacking his Kansas-Nebraska act and arousing concern about the spread of slavery into the territories. And in the 1858 debates themselves, he urged that Douglas's indifference to the spread of slavery was, among other things, a moral issue, and that Douglas and the Democrats were delinquent for not acknowledging that slavery was wrong.

media type="youtube" key="we4DofhdJs0?fs=1" height="385" width="480" In response to Douglas’s charges in Jonesboro, Lincoln opened his speech with this oft-quoted position: “I will say then that I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and politicial equality of the black and white races – that I am not nor have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favorof having the superior position assigned to the white race.” share Douglas's fame by appearing with him in debates. Douglas agreed to seven debates: in Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton, Ill. Lincoln knew that Douglas--now fighting the Democratic Buchanan administration over the constitution to be adopted by Kansas--had alienated his Southern support; and he feared Douglas's new appeal to eastern Republicans now that Douglas was battling the South. Lincoln's strategy, therefore, was to stress the gulf of principle that separated Republican opposition to slavery as a moral wrong from the moral indifference of the Democrats, embodied in legislation allowing popular sovereignty to decide the fate of each territory. Douglas, Lincoln insisted, did not care whether slavery was "voted up or voted down." By his vigorous showing against the famous Douglas, Lincoln won the debates and his first considerable national fame. He did not win the Senate seat, however; the Illinois legislature, dominated by Democratic holdovers in the upper house, elected Douglas. lincoln-douglas debates were about what the countires will do about slavery. lincoln didn't want slavery in ding o=into no more slavery in all states. he found out that douglas was a conspricay to the nationalization of slavery. this relates to debates and diplomacy in history because
 * Since his speech on the Dred Scott decision the year before, Lincoln had been making prominent use of the Declaration of Independence and clearly hoped to put Douglas in a position of having to argue with or reject its most resonant claim that all men are created equal. Before the "joint discussions" with Douglas were arranged, Lincoln had made a fiery speech in Chicago in which he had urged "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position ... Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal." This was, of course, very advanced thinking for 1858, and Douglas was out to make sure that Lincoln paid the full political price for it.[[image:http://www.lib.niu.edu/2001/iht8201111x.jpg]][[image:http://www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/pictures/stephen-a-douglas.jpg width="352" height="456"]]
 * __SUMMARY__**
 * __﻿__**the country because, he thoght that every man should be equal. douglas said that the countries should think
 * __﻿__**for themselves and decide about this matter. lincoln was trying to ban slavery from southern states which was lea

the new lincoln douglas debates //. Web. 23 Nov 2010. []. // A picture of Douglas during the Lincoln and Douglas debates. Abraham Lincoln //. Web. 23 Nov 2010. . // The picture of the Lincoln Douglas debate when Lincoln was speaking. Abraham Lincoln! // . Web. 23 Nov 2010. . Lincoln is posing for an artist trying to capture his image