Journalists accompanied both Lincoln and Douglas throughout the campaign, often staying close to their candidate to get the inside scoop. Chicago Tribune reporter Horace White followed Lincoln and years later compiled a recollection. At Jonesboro, White noted a small audience of less than one thousand people. The debate, he recalled, focused upon slavery and its ability to exist without “police regulations.” According to White, Lincoln “demolished” Douglas leaving the latter “juggling with words” in his reply. (By David Park)
Record Data
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.
Transcriber
Adapted by David Park, Dickinson College
Transcription date
07/14/2009
Transcription
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.
People
Full name
Stephen Arnold Douglas
Full name
Abraham Lincoln
