Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Alton Debate (Donald, 1996)

On the day after the Quincy debate, both Lincoln and Douglas got aboard the City of Louisiana and sailed down the Mississippi River to Alton, for the final encounter of the campaign. Looking haggard with fatigue, Douglas opened the debate on October 15 in a voice so hoarse that in the early part of his speech he could scarcely be heard. After briefly reviewing the standard arguments over which he and Lincoln had differed since the beginning of the campaign, he made the peculiar decision to devote most of his speech to a detailed defense of his course on Lecompton. He concluded with a rabble-rousing attack on the racial views he attributed to Republicans and an announcement “that the signers of the Declaration of Independence…did not mean Negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race,” when they issued that document. In his reply Lincoln said that he was happy to ignore Douglas’s long account of his feud with the Buchanan administration; he felt like the put-upon wife in an old jestbook, who stood by as her husband struggled with a bear, saying, “Go it, husband! – Go it bear!” Once again he went through his standard answers to Douglas’s charges against him and the Republican party. Recognizing that at Alton he was addressing “an audience, having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on,” he tried to explain why it was so important to keep slavery out of Kansas and other national territories….With a brief rejoinder by Douglas, the debates were ended. After that both candidates made a few more speeches to local rallies, but everybody realized that the campaign was over, and the decision now lay with the voters.