The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

David Strathairn and Richard Dreyfuss act out both sides of a fiery and furious debate-as-morality-play
To today's ears, Abraham Lincoln was himself a house divided, a man torn between his morally and intellectually evolving disgust for slavery and his political instinct to not outrun the turtle's pace of progress. In other words: If you think Honest Abe was the unblemished patron saint of equality, you will be disappointed early and often by his 1858 Illinois senatorial smackdown against the incumbent Stephen A. Douglas, where the Slavery Question was the only question. Does Lincoln — played in this reenactment with snark and subtlety by David Strathairn — say slavery is wrong? Yes. Does he call a freed slave his equal? Nope. He may be thinking it, but he declares quite the opposite.

Still, he's the lesser of two evils in this insanely intense battle of metaphors and egos. To the Democrat Douglas — a fiery pontificator, as played by Richard Dreyfuss — the issue is something to be voted on state by state, and he has no problem referring to slaves as property. Lincoln calls them, you know, people. The seven three-hour debates were (mostly) civil, unmoderated and epic, with each candidate granted huge blocks of uninterrupted stage time. It's a long haul, but episodic and easy to hit pause and return to later. It's also kinda fun to hear such grandiloquent men of high standing twist each other's words and take personal jabs. It delighted the crowd then as it should listeners 150 years later.

Text courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Association, as presented in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.
Copyright 2008 by BBC Audiobooks America. All rights reserved. Copyright exists on all recordings issued by BBC Audiobooks America. Any unauthorized broadcasting, public performance, copying or re-recording of such recordings in any manner whatsoever, will constitute an infringement of such copyright.