Other Lincoln – Douglass Debates

Timeline excerpt for mid-1850s

  • Masur map1850 // Compromise includes admission of California as free state and tougher Fugitive Slave Law
  • 1851 // Christiana resistance signals ongoing battles over personal liberty and fugitive slaves
  • 1854 // Kansas-Nebraska Act and emergence of Republican Party
  • 1854 // Fugitive slave crises over Anthony Burns, Joshua Glover and slave stampedes in St. Louis
  • 1855 // Violence erupts in “Bleeding Kansas” and continues sporadically through late 1850s
  • 1856 // Senator Charles Sumner assaulted on US senate floor
  • 1856 // Democrat James Buchanan (Dickinson Class of 1809) wins presidency in three-way contest against Republican John Fremont and American (Know Nothing) Millard Fillmore

Douglass

Lincoln

Frederick Douglass, Fifth of July speech (1852)

Lincoln’s private letters on sectional crisis (1841, 1855)

Moral Outrage vs. Political Calculation and the Question of Defining an Audience

“O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” –Douglass, July 5, 1852

“I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” –Lincoln, August 24, 1855

Lincoln in 1854“You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any one attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery. I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” –Lincoln to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855

Handout –Douglass Fifth of July (for full text, see Portable Douglass, pp. 195-222