Lincoln entered upon the task which his party friends
had devised with neither bravado nor misgiving.
He had not sought these public discussions; neither
did he shrink from them. Throughout his whole
life he appears to have been singularly correct in
his estimate of difficulties to be encountered and
of his own powers for overcoming them. Each of
these seven meetings, comprising both the Republican
and Democratic voters of the neighboring counties,
formed a vast, eager, and attentive assemblage.
It needed only the first day’s experience to
show the wisdom of the Republican leaders in forcing
a joint discussion upon Douglas. Face to face
with his competitor, he could no longer successfully
assume airs of superiority, or wrap himself in his
Senatorial dignity and prestige. They were equal
spokesmen, of equal parties, on an equal platform,
while applause and encouragement on one side balanced
applause and encouragement on the other.
In a merely forensic sense, it was indeed a battle
of giants. In the whole field of American politics
no man has equaled Douglas in the expedients and strategy
of debate. Lacking originality and constructive
logic, he had great facility in appropriating by ingenious
restatement the thoughts and formulas of others.
He was tireless, ubiquitous, unseizable. It would
have been as easy to hold a globule of mercury under
the finger’s tip as to fasten him to a point
he desired to evade. He could almost invert a
proposition by a plausible paraphrase. He delighted
in enlarging an opponent’s assertion to a forced
inference ridiculous in form and monstrous in dimensions.
In spirit he was alert, combative, aggressive; in manner,
patronizing and arrogant by turns.
Lincoln’s mental equipment was of an entirely
different order. His principal weapon was direct,
unswerving logic. His fairness of statement and
generosity of admission had long been proverbial.
For these intellectual duels with Douglas, he possessed
a power of analysis that easily outran and circumvented
the “Little Giant’s” most extraordinary
gymnastics of argument. But, disdaining mere quibbles,
he pursued lines of concise reasoning to maxims of
constitutional law and political morals. Douglas
was always forcible in statement and bold in assertion;
but Lincoln was his superior in quaint originality,
aptness of phrase, and subtlety of definition; and
oftentimes Lincoln’s philosophic vision and
poetical fervor raised him to flights of eloquence
which were not possible to the fiber and temper of
his opponent.
It is, of course, out of the question to abridge the
various Lincoln-Douglas discussions of which the text
fills a good-sized volume. Only a few points
of controversy may be stated. Lincoln’s
convention speech, it will be remembered, declared
that in his belief the Union could not endure permanently
half slave and half free, but must become all one
thing or all the other. Douglas in his first
speech of the campaign attacked this as an invitation
to a war of sections, declaring that uniformity would
lead to consolidation and despotism. He charged
the Republicans with intent to abolish slavery in
the States; said their opposition to the Dred Scott
decision was a desire for negro equality and amalgamation;
and prescribed his dogma of popular sovereignty as
a panacea for all the ills growing out of the slavery
agitation.
