Douglas found fault with Lincoln’s answers to the Ottawa questions:  “I ask you again, Lincoln, will you vote to admit New Mexico, when she has the requisite population with such a constitution as her people adopt, either recognizing slavery or not, as they shall determine!” He was well within the truth when he asserted that Lincoln’s answer had been purposely evasive and equivocal, “having no reference to any territory now in existence."[763] Of Lincoln’s Republican policy of confining slavery within its present limits, by prohibiting it in the Territories, he said, “When he gets it thus confined, and surrounded, so that it cannot spread, the natural laws of increase will go on until the negroes will be so plenty that they cannot live on the soil.  He will hem them in until starvation seizes them, and by starving them to death, he will put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction."[764] A silly argument which Douglas’s wide acquaintance with Southern conditions flatly contradicted and should have kept him from repeating.

To the charge of moral obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply.  “I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity, and not to us.  It is for them to decide, therefore, the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits."[765]

On the following day both Lincoln and Douglas took passage on a river steamer for Alton.  The county of Madison had once been Whig in its political proclivities.  In the State legislature it was now represented by two representatives and a senator who were Native Americans; and in the present campaign, the county was classed as doubtful.  In Alton and elsewhere there was a large German vote which was likely to sway the election.

Douglas labored under a physical disadvantage.  His voice was painful to hear, while Lincoln’s betrayed no sign of fatigue.[766] Both fell into the argument ad hominem.  Lincoln advocated holding the Territories open to “free white people” the world over—­to “Hans, Baptiste, and Patrick.”  Douglas contended that the equality referred to in the Declaration of Independence, was the equality of white men—­“men of European birth and European descent.”  Both conjured with the revered name of Clay.  Douglas persistently referred to Lincoln as an Abolitionist, knowing that his auditors had “strong sympathies southward,” as Lincoln shrewdly guessed; while Lincoln sought to unmask that “false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about."[767]