Bill of Rights in Action 29:3 - Spring 2014
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates — Springboard to the White House
Lincoln’s Response to Statement A:
Lincoln: I say, in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say when this Government was first established, it was the policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United States, where it had not existed. But Judge Douglas and his friends have broken up that policy, and placed it upon a new basis, by which it is to become national and perpetual. All I have asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of our Government originally placed it upon. I have no doubt that it would become extinct, for all time to come, if we but readopted the policy of the fathers, by restricting it to the limits it has already covered — restricting it from the new Territories.
Lincoln’s Response to Statement B:
Lincoln: “We have in this nation this element of slavery. It is an absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the opinion of all the great men who have expressed an opinion upon it, that it is a dangerous element. The Republican party thinks it wrong — we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course 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. I suppose we have no right at all to disturb it in the states where it exists.”
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