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in sentiment on the slavery question; even the old Whigs of
central Illinois had to a large extent joined the Democratic party, because of their ineradicable prejudice against what they stigmatized as “abolitionism.”
To take advantage of this prejudice,
Douglas, in his opening speech in the first debate at
Ottawa in
northern Illinois, propounded to
Lincoln a series of questions designed to commit him to strong antislavery doctrines.
He wanted to know whether
Mr. Lincoln stood pledged to the repeal of the fugitive-slave law; against the admission of any more slave States; to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; to the prohibition of the slave trade between different States; to prohibit slavery in all the
Territories; to oppose the acquisition of any new territory unless slavery were first prohibited therein.
In their second joint debate at
Freeport,
Lincoln answered that he was pledged to none of these propositions, except the prohibition of slavery in all Territories of the
United States.
In turn he propounded four questions to
Douglas, the second of which was:
Can the people of a United States Territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State constitution?
Mr. Lincoln had long and carefully studied the import and effect of this interrogatory, and nearly a month before, in a private letter, accurately foreshadowed
Douglas's course upon it:
You shall have hard work,
he wrote, “to get him directly to the point whether a territorial legislature has or has not the power to exclude slavery.
But if you succeed in bringing him to it-though he will-be compelled to say it possesses no such power-he will instantly take ground that slavery cannot actually exist ”
