The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Of Slavery After The Civil War

Slavery, as many people know, was the cause of an ongoing dispute during the early-mid 1800s that caused several things like states seceding, rebellions, and even the Civil War. Slavery had a huge effect on politics and several debates, decisions, acts, and compromises had to be formed in order to keep the people in check. In the North and West, most people were anti-slavery while most people in the South were pro-slavery. These two regions were way more different than they were similar not only in the issue of slavery, but also in their economies which helped further the sectional disputes. Slavery and the impacts it had greatly shaped our country and made people choose between slavery with all of the money it offered, and freeing the

One of these methods was using debates to inform the public about the issue at hand and how the debaters thought it should best be handled. A series of debates that could arguably be called the most famous and country-defining debates were the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They took place in Illinois between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who were both running for Senator. They discussed the topic of slavery in almost every debate and although Lincoln lost the debates they gave him fame that would help with his presidential election. Going on to decisions we come to the Dred Scott decision, a truly pro-slavery decision that would show the abolitionist thinkers that now not only is Congress pro-slavery by the Supreme Court is too. The Dred Scott decision came about when Dred Scott, an enslaved African American man, claimed that because he was living in a free territory, he should be a free man. The case went to the Supreme Court where judge Taney made several rulings that included: African Americans, because they weren’t official U.S. citizens, didn’t have the right to sue in a federal court, that living on free soil didn’t make a slave free, that the Missouri Compromise wasn’t constitutional, and that Congress couldn’t ban slavery in any federal territory. While debates and decisions did have a huge impact on the political side of slavery, they weren’t the only things for so many things caused slavery to become as “important” as it