I cite certain of the incisive statements that came into Lincoln’s seven debates.  “A slave, says Judge Douglas (on the authority of Judge Taney), is a human being who is legally not a person but a thing.”  “I contend [says Lincoln] that slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature.  Slavery is a violation of the eternal right, and as long as God reigns and as school-children read, that black evil can never be consecrated into God’s truth.”  “A man does not lose his right to a piece of property which has been stolen.  Can a man lose a right to himself if he himself has been stolen?” The following words present a summary of Lincoln’s statements: 

Judge Douglas contends that if any one man chooses to enslave another, no third man has a right to object.  Our Fathers, in accepting slavery under the Constitution as a legal institution, were of opinion, as is clearly indicated by the recorded utterances, that slavery would in the course of a few years die out.  They were quite clear in their minds that the slave-trade must be abolished and for ever forbidden and this decision was arrived at under the leadership of men like Jefferson and without a protest from the South.  Jefferson was himself the author of the Ordinance of 1787, which in prohibiting the introduction of slavery, consecrated to freedom the great territory of the North-west, and this measure was fully approved by Washington and by the other great leaders from the South.  Where slavery exists, full liberty refuses to enter.  It was only through this wise action of the Fathers that it was possible to bring into existence, through colonisation, the great territories and great States of the North-west.  It is this settlement, and the later adjustment of 1820, that Douglas and his friends in the South are undertaking to overthrow.  Slavery is not, as Judge Douglas contends, a local issue; it is a national responsibility.  The repeal of the Missouri Compromise throws open not only a great new territory to the curse of slavery; it throws open the whole slavery question for the embroiling of the present generation of Americans.  Taking slaves into free territory is the same thing as reviving the slave-trade.  It perpetuates and develops interstate slave-trade.  Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.  The Fathers did not claim that “the right of the people to govern negroes was the right of the people to govern themselves.”

The policy of Judge Douglas was based on the theory that the people did not care, but the people did care, as was evinced two years later by the popular vote for President throughout the North.  One of those who heard these debates says:  “Lincoln loved truth for its own sake.  He had a deep, true, living conscience; honesty was his polar star.  He never acted for stage effect.  He was cool, spirited, reflective, self-possessed, and self-reliant.  His style was clear, terse, compact ...  He became tremendous in the directness of his utterance when, as his soul was inspired with the thought of human right and Divine justice, he rose to impassioned eloquence, and at such times he was, in my judgment, unsurpassed by Clay or by Mirabeau.”