Placing the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Harry V. Jaffa’s meticulously crafted Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates is a careful exhumation of the competing worldviews of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Frustrated that an earlier generation of scholars had stripped Lincoln’s and Douglas’s arguments of their intellectual integrity by dismissing the debates as a pointless exercise that moved the nation closer to a needless war, Jaffa sought to rescue Lincoln’s and Douglas’s ideas. His goal was admirable. One who carefully reads the Lincoln-Douglas debates cannot help but be struck not only by the depth of their engagement but also by the sense that each man was searching for a deeper understanding of the American constitutional system and slavery’s place within it. But Jaffa’s interpretation of Lincoln’s and Douglas’s intellectual commitments is entwined with his own methodological commitments. And though Jaffa expounded on the need to “see the past as it appeared in the past and not only in the light of the opinions of a later and different age” (1959, 28) and later characterized Crisis as an attempt “to adopt, however provisionally, the viewpoint of the debaters themselves” (2009, 8), he overlooks a series of contexts that help illuminatee many of Lincoln’s and Douglas’s arguments.