While covering Vice President Gore's campaign the past few months, I've been rereading the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the downtime on buses and planes. As a first-time political reporter, I figured it might help me. I was right -- but in a way I hadn't expected.
There is a yearning today for a return to "positive" debate without "distortions." So I was surprised to find that our oft-maligned politics bears a striking similarity to the oft-admired discourse of 1858.There is, to be sure, a world of difference between then and now. Senate candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas squared off over the inflammatory issue of slavery, and their public exchanges in a sparsely populated area of a still-developing nation resounded because of the profoundly moral nature of their dispute.
But don't let nostalgia color your view of how Lincoln and Douglas waged their war of words. They went after each other with everything they had: nasty charges of corruption and forgery, predatory appeals to racial fears, exaggerations, distortions, evasions, insults and more. They deployed every weapon in their rhetorical arsenals -- and thereby succeeded in crystallizing the terrible conflict.
The enormous crowds that came to hear them -- more than 10,000 at six of the seven debates -- loved every minute. Newspaper accounts record the cheers, catcalls and interjections of a citizenry that needed no paternalistic protection from "negative campaigning." The voices in the crowds lift off the pages: "Hit 'em again!" "You've got him!" and (my favorite) "Hit 'em on the woolly side!"
The candidates didn't disappoint. Lincoln spent a lot of time, especially in the early debates, accusing Douglas of participating in a vast conspiracy to "nationalize" slavery. The gist of his charge was that key Democrats -- including Douglas, President James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger Taney -- had agreed among themselves to use Congress and the Supreme Court to extend slavery first into the territories and, later, into all the states. It was pure scare tactics. Lincoln could not have really believed it, and he certainly came nowhere close to proving it. Douglas accused Lincoln of "trying to deceive the people." But the exchange captured the alarm, even the paranoia, that many Westerners felt about the spread of slavery into nearby Kansas -- and it advanced public discussion of the issue.
Douglas ran on race. In Illinois, where 80 percent of the voters had refused to grant citizenship to "Negroes," his approach was ugly -- and effective. He called Lincoln "a Black Republican" for insisting that the Declaration of Independence phrase "all men are created equal" included blacks. That, Douglas warned, meant "that the Negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters."
In the end, all the high ideals and low blows led to a crushing defeat for Lincoln -- and a Pyrrhic victory for Douglas. He was finished as a national candidate trying to appeal across sectional lines. Lincoln emerged as the man to face the crisis he knew would come.
Perhaps we, the media, ought to let the debate take place without constant comment about who's negative and who's positive. Loud and vituperative, idealistic and passionate -- that's the way politics has always been in the Union that Lincoln gave his life to preserve.
Terry Moran is a reporter for ABC News.