ZadekpediaThe Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 are invoked in these episodes only in passing, as supporting evidence for arguments about other things. No excerpt describes the debates themselves — their number, location, format, or subject matter — and none quotes from them. What the sources do supply is the role the debates played in Lincoln’s national standing and the light they cast on how senators were chosen before the 17th Amendment.
The debates and Lincoln’s national reputation
John Cribb, discussing the Election of 1860, says Lincoln’s name was nationally known thanks mostly to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, because the debates were so important and engaging that newspapers all over the country reprinted them, either in part or in full. On Cribb’s account this publicity is what made Lincoln something other than an unknown: he was much less known than the other leading Republican candidates, but not a figure nobody had heard of. Cribb adds that Lincoln had also laid groundwork by going to New York City to give a big speech at Cooper Union and by doing a speaking tour in the East. America’s Second Founding (2021)
The same excerpt places the debates in the sequence that produced Lincoln’s nomination. In May of 1860, a week before the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Republicans in Illinois nominated him as their choice for the nomination at a makeshift convention hall called the Wigwam, where old fence rails Lincoln had split as a young man were dug up and carried in on a campaign banner reading that Abe Lincoln was the rail candidate for president in 1860. At the national convention Lincoln did not attend, that not being the custom; his campaign team went instead. William Henry Seward of New York was the leading candidate, with Salmon Chase, Simon Cameron and Edward Bates also in the field. On the first ballot Seward received 173 and a half votes and Lincoln 102; on the second, Seward 184 and a half and Lincoln 181. Lincoln, following on the telegraph wires from Springfield, said he could find no fault with this and thought they might well nominate him on the next ballot, and they did, as people came over to him as the moderate. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb also notes that in the general election the South did not view Lincoln as a moderate at all, many Southerners taking him for an outright abolitionist, which Cribb says he was not. The Democrats split over how to handle slavery and a third party split them further; Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes against the 152 needed, and received not one single vote in the lower South states that would shortly make up the Confederacy, largely because his name was kept off the ballot there. America’s Second Founding (2021)
The debates and the 17th Amendment
F.H. Buckley raises the debates in a different connection, arguing against the idea that the 17th Amendment made a heck of a change. Before the amendment, when states appointed senators, who a voter chose as a state representative was a function of who that voter thought the representative would support for the Senate. That, Buckley says, is the history of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858: people were not voting for the senator but for state representatives, and they were voting for a slate that would support either Douglas or Lincoln. Senate selection, on this account, already was democratic in that sense. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley’s remark comes in reply to Bob Zadek, who had described the 17th Amendment of 1913 as changing the indirect election of senators by state houses to direct election by voters, and who said that by his own standards it was probably one of the more damaging amendments to the Constitution. Buckley distinguishes his position: he says he did not claim the 17th Amendment worked, but that the small-d democratic instincts of the progressives, expressed in initiative and referendum laws and the 17th Amendment, came from Western progressives, and that initiative and referendum laws have worked pretty well. He asks for charity toward progressives who did not realize how the 17th Amendment would work itself out, and locates the progressive conservative element in Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Across episodes: the same exchange, twice
The 17th Amendment discussion appears in two episodes as what is, by the episodes, the same exchange: Bob Zadek’s question about the word “works,” Buckley’s reply about Western progressives, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates invoked to show that Senate elections were already democratic in practice. The 2022-07-24 episode labels the guest F.H. Buckley and the 2022-07-27 episode labels him Frank H. Buckley; the episodes show no development between the two treatments beyond that difference in labeling. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022) Trumpism After Trump (2022)