Every student of U.S. history is likely familiar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates: a series of seven fiery rhetorical bouts over slavery held in 1858, just a few short years before the nation descended into civil war.
Yet before there was Ottawa, or Galesburg, or Quincy, there was Peoria. Abraham Lincoln’s speech on the front steps of the Peoria County Courthouse on Oct. 16, 1854 introduced many of the arguments the future president inveighed against slavery — and relaunched his career as a statesman.
Expansion of slavery
The question of slavery’s expansion shook our young nation each time the borders expanded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise eased the tensions by outlawing slavery in new states above the 36°30’ parallel, apart from Missouri.
That uneasy political truce mostly held until 1854, when U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas championed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law ripped open the old wounds by introducing a new principle of “popular sovereignty,” wherein individual territories like Kansas and Nebraska would decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, regardless of whether they lie north or south of the 36°30’ parallel.
After Stephen Douglas spoke in Peoria, Abraham Lincoln brook for dinner then delivered his address at Peoria County Courthouse.
Lincoln had largely retreated to his Springfield law practice after serving a single term in Congress from 1847-49, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act raised his ire — and reanimated his political ambitions.
The debate
When Douglas began to tour the state to tout his new law, Lincoln followed with rebuttals. Lincoln accepted an invitation from a group of prominent Peorians to respond to Douglas’s scheduled remarks on Oct. 16.
Though Lincoln and Douglas also sparred at Springfield in October 1854, it’s the Peoria speech that is best remembered by history, mostly because Lincoln himself submitted a revised copy of his remarks to a newspaper for publication (and immortalization). Douglas’s remarks do not survive.
The speakers climbed out through a window in the Circuit Clerk’s Office onto a stage erected on the south side of the Peoria County Courthouse.
There was no time limit set on the speeches. Dr. Robert Boal of Peoria said Douglas’s initial remarks began at 2:30 p.m. and didn’t wrap up until after 5 p.m. Rather than dive directly into his response, Lincoln instead proposed the audience go home and eat dinner. He teased to Douglas supporters that the Senator would have the final word, to encourage them to return, too.
Lincoln began his three-hour remarks around 7 p.m. His speech first takes the form of a history lesson, followed by a pointed dissection in both political and moral terms of the rationale for the Nebraska bill.
As Lincoln eloquently put it, slavery was a contradiction of the core principles laid out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
“Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other,” he said.