August 21, 1858 – Lincoln Mocks Douglas Over Concept of Judicial Supremacy When Morality is at Stake

The first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place in Ottawa, Illinois on this date in history, August 21, 1858. Lincoln addressed the subject of slavery, and averred that:

. . . . if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. The crisis would be past, and the institution might be let alone for a hundred years—if it should live so long — in the States where it exists, yet it would be going out of existence in the way best for both the black and the white races.”

But Douglas, he charges, wanted to make slavery national. Lincoln said:

This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery, and he does so not because he says it is right in itself—he does not give any opinion on that—but because it has been decided by the court, and, being decided by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law — not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ He places it on that ground alone, and you will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision, commits himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ The next decision, as much as this, will be a ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe.”

Lincoln and Douglas

He could not “shake Judge Douglas’s tooth loose” from the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln said. “I can not divert him from it. He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott decision.”

And what are the consequences of this strict adherence to the finding of the Supreme Court, no matter what morality demands? Lincoln:

When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he ‘cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up’ — that it is a sacred right of self-government — he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”