How would Lincoln abolish slavery?  By starving it, girding it about gradually with freedom, keeping it where it was.  That was all.  What would Douglas do?  Referring to Lincoln’s looking forward to a time when slavery would be abolished everywhere Douglas said:  “I look forward to a time when each state shall be allowed to do as it pleases.  If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is not my business but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business not mine.  I care more for the great principles of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.  I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Constitution, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.”

What would Lincoln do about the fugitive-slave law?  Douglas had denounced attempts to evade it and actual violations of it.  Even the Whigs frowned on its nullification.  What would Lincoln do?  He was not in favor of its repeal.  He had said at Freeport:  “I think under the Constitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional fugitive-slave law....  As we are now in no agitation in regard to an alteration or modification of that law, I would not be the man to introduce it as a new subject of agitation upon the general question of slavery.”

For the rest, what did it all come to?  Like two pugilists Lincoln and Douglas blocked each other’s blows, drove each other into corners.  Lincoln twitted Douglas about being on both sides of the matter of extending the Missouri Compromise.  Then Douglas tripped Lincoln, who had asserted that only slavery had ever disturbed the peace of the Union.  “How about the War of 1812, and the Hartford convention?” asked Douglas.  How about the tariff and South Carolina in 1832?  He might have asked, how about the Alien and Sedition laws and the Kentucky resolutions of 1798.  But for the rest, what did it all come to?

Lincoln contended that Congress had the power to forbid slavery in the territories; Douglas worked up from a position, which scarcely denied the power, but rather shrank from its use, to the position that sovereignty abode in the people of the territory; and that as Congress has no express grant of power to legislate upon slavery as to a territory, the territorial sovereignty had the only power to do so.  He attacked Lincoln’s position that a territory is a creature of Congress as a property, to be clothed with powers or denied powers; and particularly with powers not possessed by Congress itself.  This doctrine led to imperialism.  Douglas held that Congress had the power to organize territories under the clause providing for the admission of new states; but when they were organized they assumed an organic sovereignty out of an inchoate sovereignty, and had the right to legislate as they chose to the same extent as a state.  It was the old fight between implied powers and strict construction.