The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 are mentioned in two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as an illustration within an argument about something else. Neither excerpt treats the debates as its subject: no speaker describes the format, the number of debates, the specific arguments, or the outcome of the Illinois contest. What the excerpts supply is the debates’ role as a national publicity event and their role as evidence about how U.S. senators were chosen before the 17th Amendment.
The debates as national publicity
John Cribb, discussing the Election of 1860, attributes Lincoln’s national profile chiefly to the debates. Lincoln, he says, was a dark horse candidate, but his name was nationally known “thanks mostly to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858,” because the debates were important and engaging enough that newspapers across the country reprinted them, either in part or in full America’s Second Founding (2021). Cribb adds that Lincoln had also laid groundwork by speaking at Cooper Union in New York City and by making a speaking tour in the East, so it was not that nobody had heard of him — but he remained much less known than the other leading Republican candidates.
Cribb’s account of the 1860 nomination places Lincoln’s position against William Henry Seward of New York, who had been governor and senator from New York and was the leading candidate, along with Salmon Chase, Simon Cameron and Edward Bates. Cribb describes Seward as very much against slavery and the Republican Party as founded largely to combat the evil of slavery, but says Seward had gone so far out on the issue that many Republicans worried he was not electable and would be perceived as too radical. Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans of Illinois a week before the Republican National Convention in Chicago, 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 a campaign banner reading “Abe Lincoln is the rail candidate for president in 1860.”
On the first ballot at the national convention, Cribb says, 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 in Springfield, said, “I can find no fault with this. I think they may well nominate me on the next ballot.” He was nominated on the next ballot as delegates came over to him as the moderate. In the general election the Democrats split over slavery, and a third party split them further; Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes against a threshold of 152, and received not one single vote in the lower South states, largely because his name was kept off the ballot there. Cribb notes that Lincoln had served four terms in the Illinois state legislature and one term in Congress, and had never run anything larger than a law office with two partners and some clerks.
The debates and the indirect election of senators
F.H. Buckley invokes the debates in a different connection: the argument over the 17th Amendment. Bob Zadek, in the same exchange, describes the amendment as one that changed the indirect election of senators, who were elected at that point by state houses, to direct election by voters, and says he would call it probably one of the more damaging amendments to the Constitution Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022). Buckley responds that he did not say the 17th Amendment worked; what he said was 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 he would argue initiative and referendum laws have worked pretty well while declining to make the same claim for the 17th Amendment. He asks for charity toward old progressives who did not realize how the 17th Amendment would work itself out.
Buckley then says he is not among those who think the 17th Amendment made a heck of a change, because even before it, when states appointed senators, the state representative a voter chose was a function of whom the voter thought that representative would support for the Senate. He cites the history of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 as the illustration: people were not voting for the senator, they were voting for state representatives, but they were voting for a slate that would support either Douglas or Lincoln. In that sense, he says, it already was democratic. His broader point is that what was specifically progressive was the sense that more democracy was needed, that people should be represented better, that the American people could be trusted to get it right and politicians could not — and that this was why the 17th Amendment was supported by the same people who supported initiatives and referendum, who were Westerners. He calls this part of our Western heritage and ties it to the progressive conservative element as expressed in Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.
Across episodes: the same exchange in two episodes
The Buckley exchange on the 17th Amendment appears in two episodes with nearly identical text. In the earlier episode, dated 2022-07-24, the guest is labeled F.H. Buckley and the segment is titled “The 17th Amendment and Small-D Democracy”; in the later episode, dated 2022-07-27, the guest is labeled Frank H. Buckley and the segment carries the same title Trumpism After Trump (2022). The Lincoln-Douglas reference is the same in both: Buckley’s point that voters choosing state representatives were choosing a slate that would support either Douglas or Lincoln. The excerpts show no development between the two treatments — the later episode repeats the earlier argument rather than revising or extending it. The Cribb episode, dated 2021-07-05, is the earliest of the three and uses the debates for an unrelated purpose, the 1860 nomination.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the debates themselves: no speaker states how many there were, where they were held, what was said, or how the Illinois contest turned out. Nothing in the sources gives the outcome of the 1858 Senate election, the names of the offices the two men sought, or the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska question that presumably framed the contest. The excerpts also do not state the date the 17th Amendment was ratified beyond Zadek’s reference to 1913, nor do they identify the amendment’s text or the case law construing it.