On October 13, 1858, two candidates for U.S. Senate met in Quincy’s public square for their sixth debate. Quincy, in the west-central portion of the state, was a true battleground where both candidates saw reasonable prospects of victory: it had been Douglas’ home district, while Lincoln counted key local politicians as allies. Boatloads of Douglas supporters came from Missouri to cheer him, and boatloads of Iowans traveled downriver to shout approval for Lincoln. Before a crowd of nearly 15,000 people, the candidates debated with intellectual rigor what Americans ought to do about slavery and, in doing so, closely examined the meaning of democracy to nineteenth-century America. In Quincy, Lincoln voiced his strongest stand yet against slavery, calling it “a moral, a social, and a political wrong,” while Douglas replied that slavery was not a moral issue and argued that states “can exist forever divided into free and slave states.” At the time, tall grasses covered the square, which was enclosed by a double fence, with an outer hitching rack for horses and wagons and turnstiles to keep out roaming livestock, and an inner high board fence. Lincoln was a successful lawyer whose political career included four terms in the state legislature and one term in the U.S. House; after retiring from politics, he returned when the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 permitted slavery in areas declared free since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Douglas, running for a third term in the U.S. Senate, had helped guide that act through Congress with the assistance of Quincyan William A. Richardson, chair of the House Committee on the Territories. The act’s principle of popular sovereignty let territories decide whether to be free or slave and placed Douglas in direct conflict with Republicans over the expansion of slavery, a fundamental difference that underscored this debate.
