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"Let the voice of the people rule." With this grandiose declaration at the dawn of 1859, Stephen Arnold Douglas welcomed the news that the Illinois legislature had re-elected him to the United States Senate. His victory over Abraham Lincoln followed a statewide campaign whose outcome, two months earlier, he had already deemed a "glorious triumph for the principle of self-government." The Democratic senator's euphoria was understandable. He had survived an unexpectedly strong challenge from the newly organized Republican party, and also seen off the "Danites," the local supporters of President James Buchanan, keen to punish him for his spectacular breach with the national administration. Pushing his voice and body to their limits during the four-month campaign, when he traveled some five thousand miles to deliver nearly sixty speeches, Douglas had drawn on the debating qualities that had won him the title of the "Little Giant" and made him the most formidable congressional presence of his time.
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Throughout that summer and fall Douglas had repeatedly castigated Lincoln for his leadership of a party tainted with abolitionist poison, insisting a Republican victory would open the door to a racial revolution that would not only raise African Americans to civic and political equality with whites but also promote the races' sexual intermixing. Acutely attuned to Illinois voters' deep race consciousness and to the strength of conservative sentiment in the state's swing counties, Douglas hammered home his twin themes: Lincoln's ill-concealed radicalism and, by contrast, the stabilizing, consensual benefits of his own doctrine of "popular sovereignty," which honored within each state and territorial community the wishes of the democratic majority of white men.
Was the Little Giant the real victor, however? It was, after all, chiefly thanks to Lincoln and not Douglas that the joint debates of 1858—prologue to a reversal of their respective fortunes in the presidential race of 1860—would become the stuff of legend. And there are more prosaic reasons for crowning Lincoln with the moral victor's laurels. As his lamenting supporters maintained, and as Allen Guelzo confirms in his splendid new study of the campaign, Lincoln would surely have won a direct popular election. Opposition Republican candidates for the legislature that sent Douglas to Washington actually secured more votes than those cast for the incumbent's own Democratic party. It was Democratic holdovers and an outdated apportionment which gave Douglas a narrow majority in the two houses of the legislature: thanks to the rapidly changing demography of Illinois during the 1850s it took more votes to elect a Republican than a Democrat.
Douglas won, but at a cost. Lincoln's question to Douglas at Freeport, designed to expose the incompatibility of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling (upholding slaveholders' rights in the federal territories) and Douglas' popular sovereignty doctrine (reverencing local opinion) elicited an answer that did Douglas real damage among the southern Democrats who dominated the party in Washington. Douglas' position was not new, but in its more high-profile and widely discussed form as the "Freeport Doctrine"—that a territorial legislature could effectively prohibit slavery simply by failing to pass protective local laws—it came to be the handiest of all weapons for those out to deny him the presidential nomination in 1860.
At the same time, Lincoln could take credit for having used the Freeport exchanges, and the joint debates collectively, to highlight the deep differences between him and his better-known, more successful rival. Eastern Republicans, dazzled by Douglas in the early months of 1858 when he confronted the Buchanan administration over its supine support for the proslavery Lecompton constitution in Kansas, looked to embrace a stunning convert and urged he be allowed a clear run for re-election. It was philosophical concern and not mere self-interest that prompted alarm in Lincoln and his western allies: the ensuing canvass exposed the chasm between the clarity of the Republicans' policy of slavery restriction and the moral slipperiness of Douglas' version of popular sovereignty. Lincoln's earnest stand against the lower ground of popular sovereignty, at a defining moment in his party's evolution, stiffened Republicans' ideological backbone. It would also give credibility to his bid for the presidential nomination in 1860.
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