l began
which was to rivet national attention and give Lincoln a national
prominence.

The challenge on Lincoln's part was a piece of superb generalship. In
such a contest, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Whatever
the result, the fact that he had crossed swords with so renowned a man
as Stephen A. Douglas would give him a kind of reflected glory. But in
addition to that, he had the better side of the question. His course was
simple; he was seeking the support of anti-slavery people; Douglas's
task was much more complex, for he wished to offend neither northern nor
southern Democrats, and he soon found himself offending both. To carry
water on both shoulders is always a risky thing to attempt, and Douglas
soon found himself fettered by the awkward position he was forced to
maintain; while Lincoln, free from any such handicap, could strike with
all his strength.

His stand from the first was a bold one--so bold that many of his
followers regarded it with consternation and disapproval. In his speech
accepting the nomination, he had said, "I believe this government cannot
endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one
thing or all the other," and he pursued this line of argument in the
debates alleging that the purpose of the pro-slavery men was to make
slavery perpetual and universal, and pointing to recent history in
proof of the assertion. When asked by Douglas whether he considered the
negro his equal, he answered: "In the right to eat the bread which his
own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the
equal of every living man." He was not an abolitionist, and declared
more than once that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it
exists," that he had "no lawful right to do so," but only to prohibit it
in "any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence
of the evil."

Even so skillful a debater as Douglas soon found himself hard put to it
to answer Lincoln's arguments, without offending one or the other of the
powerful factions whose support he must have to reach the presidency. At
the beginning, his experience and adroitness gave him an advantage,
which, however, Lincoln's earnestness and directness soon overcame. Tens
of thousands of people gathered to hear the debates, they were printed
from end to end of the country, and Lincoln loomed larger than ever
before the