the police and soldiers.  For this distressing state of affairs many remedies were offered; none with more zeal and persistence than the proposal for a higher tariff to take the place of the law of March, 1857, a Democratic measure making drastic reductions in the rates of duty.  In the manufacturing districts of the North, the panic was ascribed to the “Democratic assault on business.”  So an old issue was again vigorously advanced, preparatory to the next presidential campaign.

=The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.=—­The following year the interest of the whole country was drawn to a series of debates held in Illinois by Lincoln and Douglas, both candidates for the United States Senate.  In the course of his campaign Lincoln had uttered his trenchant saying that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.  I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”  At the same time he had accused Douglas, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court of acting in concert to make slavery national.  This daring statement arrested the attention of Douglas, who was making his campaign on the doctrine of “squatter sovereignty;” that is, the right of the people of each territory “to vote slavery up or down.”  After a few long-distance shots at each other, the candidates agreed to meet face to face and discuss the issues of the day.  Never had such crowds been seen at political meetings in Illinois.  Farmers deserted their plows, smiths their forges, and housewives their baking to hear “Honest Abe” and “the Little Giant.”

The results of the series of debates were momentous.  Lincoln clearly defined his position.  The South, he admitted, was entitled under the Constitution to a fair, fugitive slave law.  He hoped that there might be no new slave states; but he did not see how Congress could exclude the people of a territory from admission as a state if they saw fit to adopt a constitution legalizing the ownership of slaves.  He favored the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the total exclusion of it from the territories of the United States by act of Congress.

Moreover, he drove Douglas into a hole by asking how he squared “squatter sovereignty” with the Dred Scott decision; how, in other words, the people of a territory could abolish slavery when the Court had declared that Congress, the superior power, could not do it under the Constitution?  To this baffling question Douglas lamely replied that the inhabitants of a territory, by “unfriendly legislation,” might make property in slaves insecure and thus destroy the institution.  This answer to Lincoln’s query alienated many Southern Democrats who believed that the Dred Scott decision settled the question of slavery in the territories for all time.  Douglas won the election to the Senate; but Lincoln, lifted into national fame by the debates, beat him in the campaign for President two years later.