Sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull.

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There has never been anything like them, before or since. It is not the least part of the Lincoln-Douglas debates’ uniqueness that the texts of the debates were formed from what was a new phenomenon at the time, namely newspaper transcripts of entire speeches. In brackets within the texts of the two men’s speeches appear notes of crowd response or quotes of crowd members’ comments. Some of these are hilarious. There were seven debates between the two men all across Illinois, every one of them held in the open air, each three hours long. Much if not most of the audience stood for the three hours. The format of the debates was elegantly simple. There were no moderators, no restrictions on what was to be discussed, no buzzers, no mute buttons. Although there were no constraints on the subjects to be taken up, and although many matters arose in the course of the debates, the only subject really under consideration was slavery, which as Lincoln said, was the only problem which ever threatened the very existence of the United States.

In one of the greatest examples of the exercise of free speech in all our history, the burning issue at stake was freedom itself, and whether it could prevail against its hideous opposite, its negation. The initial speaker spoke for an hour; the other replied for an hour and a half; the first spoke again, in rejoinder, for half an hour. The first debate was held in the heat of late summer, the last in the chill of autumn, a few weeks before the election. Some of the debates were rather sparsely attended; others drew thousands. The Galesburg debate, held at little Knox College, was the fifth and may have drawn the largest crowd, estimated at somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand - in a town whose population was something over five thousand! Although Lincoln is now our most famous president, in 1858 he was not a national figure. He had served only one term in the House of Representatives in the 1840s, and he was well-known only to the people of Illinois. Douglas, by contrast, though now not so well remembered, was a sitting senator and one of the most famous men in America. Indeed, he was one of the most powerful men in Washington; with the passing, by 1852, of the great age of senatorial oratory, in the persons of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, Douglas had soon become the senator with the most clout - an old English word repurposed as a twentieth-century Chicagoism that Douglas would have loved. (He is given the title Judge in the text, because he had served on the Illinois bench for a time.)

Neither man had been born in Illinois, in which citizens of the fledgling republic had only begun settling (in more than negligible numbers) a little more than a generation before. This is important, because it means that most of the people in the state came from somewhere else and brought with them the customs of the place from which they came. Accordingly, Illinois was a microcosm of the United States: the southern part of the state was populated largely by old southerners, the northern part by old New Englanders and other northerners. (On your map of the U.S., you will notice that the southernmost point in Illinois, the town of Cairo, on the east bank of the Mississippi, whose muddy brown waters are joined at just this point by the whirling blues of the 800-mile Ohio, is less than half as far from the state of Mississippi as it is from the city of Chicago. Cairo was the southernmost location in all of the free states, a geographic fact which Twain turned into a point of moral and psychological no-return in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

Lincoln had been born in Kentucky, Douglas in New England. Lincoln lived in the capital, Springfield, in the middle of the state, Douglas in Chicago in the northern part. They had known each other for twenty-five or thirty years. Each had come to Illinois as a young man. Lincoln was now close to fifty, Douglas a few years younger. Douglas was short and stocky, Lincoln tall and lanky. Lincoln had dark, sunken eyes and a shadowy face, long and gaunt; Douglas had bright, fiery eyes, with a pale and puffy face. Douglas was a Democrat, Lincoln a Republican. The Republican party was new, having been born only four years before, in response to Douglas’ own Kansas-Nebraska Act, an earth-shaker.

Online seminars in this series will take place on Monday afternoons, 12:00-2:00PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be mailed the text. Sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 2 CEU credits for participating. This eight-week series is $500. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $50 through a refund. Payment options are available.