The challenge on Lincoln’s part was a piece of superb generalship.  In such a contest, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.  Whatever the result, the fact that he had crossed swords with so renowned a man as Stephen A. Douglas would give him a kind of reflected glory.  But in addition to that, he had the better side of the question.  His course was simple; he was seeking the support of anti-slavery people; Douglas’s task was much more complex, for he wished to offend neither northern nor southern Democrats, and he soon found himself offending both.  To carry water on both shoulders is always a risky thing to attempt, and Douglas soon found himself fettered by the awkward position he was forced to maintain; while Lincoln, free from any such handicap, could strike with all his strength.

His stand from the first was a bold one—­so bold that many of his followers regarded it with consternation and disapproval.  In his speech accepting the nomination, he had said, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.  It will become all one thing or all the other,” and he pursued this line of argument in the debates alleging that the purpose of the pro-slavery men was to make slavery perpetual and universal, and pointing to recent history in proof of the assertion.  When asked by Douglas whether he considered the negro his equal, he answered:  “In the right to eat the bread which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”  He was not an abolitionist, and declared more than once that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” that he had “no lawful right to do so,” but only to prohibit it in “any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of the evil.”

Even so skillful a debater as Douglas soon found himself hard put to it to answer Lincoln’s arguments, without offending one or the other of the powerful factions whose support he must have to reach the presidency.  At the beginning, his experience and adroitness gave him an advantage, which, however, Lincoln’s earnestness and directness soon overcame.  Tens of thousands of people gathered to hear the debates, they were printed from end to end of the country, and Lincoln loomed larger than ever before the nation; but so far as the immediate result was concerned, Douglas was the victor, for the election gave him a majority of the legislature, and he was chosen to succeed himself in the Senate.

Yet more than once he must have regretted that he had consented to cross swords with his lank opponent, for he had been forced into many an awkward corner.  There is a popular tradition that the presidential nomination came to Lincoln unsought; but this is anything but true.  On the contrary, in those debates with Douglas, he was consciously laying the foundation for his candidacy two years later.  He used every effort to drive Douglas to admissions and statements which would tell against him in a presidential campaign, while he himself took a position which would insure his popularity with the Republican party.  So his defeat at the time was of no great moment to him.