News & Events
Humanities Professors to Recreate Final Lincoln-Douglas Debate on February 18
As part of New York City College of Technology’s celebration of Black History Month, Humanities Professors Robert Geary (Lincoln) and Frank Dezego (Douglas) will recreate parts of the final of the seven Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 on Wednesday, February 18, 2009, from 6 to 7:30 p.m., in the College’s Atrium Amphitheater. The event is free and open to the College community and the public.
The performance, produced and directed by Geary, will also include a dramatization by City Tech students Yesenia Ward and Terel Watson depicting the morning-after reactions of two New York City residents reading from the Daily News portions of President Barack Obama’s January 20, 2009, inaugural address. Obama, who served as Illinois’ junior U.S. Senator until his election as president, announced his candidacy for the nation’s highest office in February 2007 in Springfield, IL, long home to lawyer-politician Lincoln and Illinois’ capital since it became a state in 1818.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates were a series of seven encounters between Lincoln, a Republican and former four-term member of the Illinois Legislature and one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat and the incumbent Senator, for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate. At the time, U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were campaigning for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois Legislature. While a majority of the state’s voters voted Republican, the Democrats took
the majority of legislative seats and Douglas returned
to the U.S. Senate.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, held in the Illinois towns of Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton between August 21 and October 15, 1858, drew sizable audiences of up to 10,000 each, including people from neighboring states. The seven joint appearances attracted intense newspaper coverage, and papers in Chicago sent stenographers to record every word of each debate. The accounts were published in papers throughout the country, with some craftily edited to reflect a given paper’s political bias.
Following his defeat for the U.S. Senate seat, Lincoln edited the texts of all seven debates and had them published in a book that quickly achieved national popularity. The main topic discussed in the seven debates was slavery, and the encounters previewed the issues that Lincoln would face in the presidential election two years later.
Competing against Democratic presidential nominee Douglas and other minor candidates, Lincoln went on to win the election by a comfortable margin and without much in the way of actively campaigning. The widespread media coverage of the 1858 debates had raised Lincoln’s national stature enormously and his positions on slavery and other issues carried him to victory. The issue of slavery and a Civil War would dominate the political landscape over the course of Lincoln’s presidency until his assassination in 1865.
The Lincoln-Douglas debate format that currently is used in high school and college competitions is named after this series of debates. And while contemporary presidential debates trace their roots to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the format used today is very different from that followed by Lincoln and Douglas. In 1858, one candidate spoke for 60 minutes and the second for 90 minutes. The first speaker was then given an additional 30 minutes to respond. As the incumbent senator, Douglas spoke first in four of the seven debates.
“The issue of slavery was a highly volatile one when Lincoln and Douglas debated,” says Professor Geary, “and their audiences were passionately partisan one way or the other. It was, of course, a very different time and different social environment, and historians tell us that many people in each audience were armed.
“The verbal reactions to what was being said by each speaker on the part of those attending the debates,” Geary goes on to say, “were often anything but polite. Lincoln and Douglas were careful not to seem to directly attack members of their audiences for the positions they held. Rather, each man focused on his opponent’s immediate arguments as well as on arguments from earlier speeches and debates.”
Citing David Zarefsky’s book The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, Professor Dezego says that the debates “’illustrate the masterful use of argument strategies and tactics in the public forum. Both candidates were masters at selecting effective arguments from the arsenal of possibilities. Both made the most of the arguments they picked, minimized their own burdens of proof while adding to those of the opponent, employed humor and ridicule gracefully, and posed questions that went to the heart of the matter and put the opponent on the spot.
“Since most students and others are largely unaware of the significance and importance of these debates,” Dezego adds, “we believe that the February 18 presentation at City Tech will greatly enlighten them. The past influences the present, and a familiarity with public discourse, such as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, can enable us to more fully understand how we have arrived at our current freedoms.”
“In his inaugural remarks, Barack Obama told us that ‘We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents,’” says Geary. “Lincoln fought to make those ideals a reality and President Obama represents the embodiment of them. Lincoln can rest easy.”
City Tech’s Atrium Amphitheater is located at 300 Jay Street (at Tillary) in Downtown Brooklyn. Doors open at 5:45 p.m. and seating is limited.
2.17.09
