The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text

The Seventh Joint Debate at Alton, October 15, 1858

THE SEVENTH JOINT DEBATE AT ALTON Friday, October 15, 1858 •THE SCENE· IN TERMS OF PURE DRAMA, the Lincoln-Douglas encounter at Alton paled before the memory of the violent confrontation that had made the river village infamous twenty-one years before. Back in 1837, abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered here by a violent pro-slavery mob while trying to protect his printing press from destruction. The final debate of the 1858 Senate campaign seemed tame by comparison. Because of Alton's ugly history, however, and because the debate there was the very last meeting between the candidates, the debate at the Mississippi River town in southwestern Illinois was expected to attract a considerable audience. Steamboats offered one-dollar, round-trip discount fares from St. Louis, and the railroads advertised attractive excursion rates of their own. A local newspaper predicted: "There will be a great attendance." It was a beautiful day-"one of the prettiest I have ever known in October," an onlooker remembered-but although the usual retinue of spectators rolled in 322 • THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES • on carriages and wagons, their numbers never exceeded 5,000, making the total crowd at Alton the second smallest of the series. Nonetheless, by noon, the "whole town" seemed to one eyewitness "alive and stirring with large masses of human beings." Bands played, salesmen sold painkillers from the streets, little knots of boys and men marched up and down the public square shouting "hurrahs" for Lincoln or Douglas, and food emporiums and saloons overflowed with merry patrons. The competing banners floating high above the streets declared: "Popular sovereignty! Stephen A. Douglas, the People's Choice" and "Lincoln Not Trotted Out Yet." For the first and only time, the debaters arrived in town together. Both men had remained at Quincy following their encounter on the thirteenth, and the following evening each booked overnight passage on the steamboat Ciry qfLouisiana for the 115-mi1e cruise down the Mississippi River to Alton, where they arrived at five a.m. on the fifteenth. The weary campaigners were then escorted to separate hotels, Lincoln by one account "a little despondent" when his own quiet welcome without "parade or fuss" was easily outdone by a "pompous" overture of martial music and artillery fire in Douglas's honor. Waiting for Lincoln was his wife, Mary, whom he described to a supporter as "dispirited" over his chances in the coming election. The Lincolns' eldest son, Robert, was also on hand for the final debate, in his role as fourth corporal in the Springfield cadets. His unit arrived by train in full uniform to observe the great event. The debaters began promptly at two p.m., from a platform erected for the occasion alongside Alton's new city hall. The "whole arena," declared an eyewitness, "was crowded with thousands of people for several blocks in front of the stand." But the crowd was likely startled when they first saw the senator and heard Douglas's ragged delivery. Not only was his voice "completely shattered" by the long campaign, he also looked "bloated" and "haggard" to one observer. An eyewitness was certain he was heard only by "a small crowd gathered closely about the stand." By contrast, Lincoln looked sunburned, but "as fresh as if he had just entered the campaign." For both speakers a journalist noted "rather less than the ordinary amount of applause." Neither candidate broke new ground in Alton; instead both used their time effectively to sum up the arguments they had introduced in the six meetings since August. Alton provided them their final The Seventh joint Debate at Alton, October 15, 1858 opportunity to discuss the many additional issues facing the state and the nation. As in the first six debates, however, the focus here remained immovably fixed on slavery and union. 323 Douglas devoted his opening hour to an impassioned defense of popular sovereignty, and a renewed attack on Lincoln. He labored t distance himself from President Buchanan, a fellow Democrat, while endeavoring to identity himself more closely with Lincoln's hero, Henry Clay, a Whig. And he made a strong appeal for unified support for the Democrats, the only party, he declared, for "national men." Conceding that the Alton audience enjoyed "strong sympathies by birth, education, and otherwise, with the South," Lincoln attempted again in his rebuttal to differentiate between favoring black equality and merely extending to blacks the blessings of the...