Recollection by Horace White, Jonesboro Debate, September 15, 1858

    Source citation
    Horace White, The Lincoln and Douglas Debates: An Address Before the Chicago Historical Society, February 17, 1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914), 23.
    Type
    Book
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Transcriber
    Adapted by David Park, Dickinson College
    Transcription date
    The following transcript has been adapted from The Lincoln and Douglas Debates: An Address Before the Chicago Historical Society, February 17, 1914 (1914).

    The next joint debate took place at Jonesboro, in "Lower Egypt." This was in a region where the Republican votes were so few that they were usually classified as "scattering." The audience was the smallest of the series, rather less than one thousand. Mr. Lincoln here took up Douglas' Freeport speech and demolished it completely. He showed that it was not true that slavery could not exist unless supported by local police regulations, for in fact slavery always began without legislation and so continued until it became so extensive as to require legislation to regulate and support it. It began in this way in our own country in 1619. Dred Scott himself was held as-a slave in Minnesota without any local police regulations. But if citizens had a constitutional right to take slaves into a territory and hold them there as property, the local legislature would be bound to afford them all needful protection, and failing to do so Congress would be bound to supply the deficiency. The logic of this position was unassailable. The only way that Douglas could reply was by likening slavery to liquor-selling, saying that if a man should take a stock of liquors to a territory, his right to sell it there would be subject to the local law and if that were unfriendly it would drive him out just as effectually as though there were a constitutional prohibition of liquor-selling. This was another example of his skill in juggling with words. If liquor-selling in territories were a constitutional right no territorial law could render that right nugatory.

    How to Cite This Page: "Recollection by Horace White, Jonesboro Debate, September 15, 1858," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/27534.