Quincy

Debate Day in Quincy

‘The Ladies, God Bless Them!’

Quincy’s two newspapers, the Daily Whig and the Daily Herald, had been slugging it out for weeks in columns anticipating the arrival on October 13, 1858, of their champions for the Sixth Illinois Senatorial Debate. The Whig glorified Abraham Lincoln and the Herald did the same for Stephen A. Douglas.

Since the days of the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers, newspapers took political sides. Quincy’s were no different. The ink from Quincy’s partisan press flowed with the force of the great Mississippi River just a few blocks west. Quincy and the communities around were fired up for the contest. The Herald predicted waves of Democrats would turn out for Douglas. Learning that spirited Republican women had organized to attend the debate – “The Ladies, God Bless Them” headlined the Republican-leaning newspaper two days before the debate – the Whig expected a “large number of private carriages, loaded with the fair freight,” would supplement those who would come to demonstrate for Lincoln. Never mind that women were not allowed to vote

Quincy was the largest of the seven communities in which the parties’ candidates to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate would speak. Each newspaper promised its party would turn out its partisans in greater number. The Whig estimated a crowd of 12,000. Far more exuberant, the Herald suggested the number would be closer to 20,000. Historians place the attendance somewhere in the middle.

The boom of a cannon mounted on a flatcar at the rear of an elaborately decorated Illinois Central train announced Douglas’s arrival in Quincy the evening before the debate. A large crowd of Quincyans greeted the Little Giant, who had lived among them for six years – his home was on the northwest corner of Third and Jersey – from 1841, when at 27 years old he was appointed Judge of the Illinois Supreme Court and assigned to the Fifth Judicial Circuit, headquartered in Quincy. In 1846 the Illinois legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate and, representing the entire state, Douglas decided to move to Chicago.

But Douglas was no less favored by Quincy’s Democrats. They paraded their candidate through Quincy’s downtown, the light from torches throwing huge dancing shadows along the faces of the German- and Irish-built Italianate buildings. It was midnight before Douglas’s supporters released him to the comforts of the elegant Quincy House hotel.

Lured by land available for $1.25 an acre in the vast Military Tract between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, Kentuckians and New Englanders in approximately equal numbers had arrived in the 1830s. The town boomed. By 1836 the land office at Quincy recorded sales of 569,376 acres, more than any of the ten land offices in Illinois. And farthest west of the Old Northwest towns, Quincy became the launch point for many westbound emigrants. The booming community also would soon become the destination for German and Irish immigrants, industrious settlers who would establish small trade and craft shops, cooperages, wagon manufactories, distilleries and breweries, brick works, machine shops and related industries.

City of Quincy Lincoln Bicentennial Commission 706 Maine Quincy, Illinois 62301

The Mississippi River assured Quincy’s muscle in commerce. The city was the only location within 150 miles at which the bluffs reached the river and at which the channel, even at low water, remained deep enough for steamboats to dock. By 1853 Quincy had become a port of entry and boats with foreign goods soon were docking along the city’s river front. In 1856 nearly 3,000 steamboats docked at Quincy to deliver supplies and sundries for the city’s merchants and to take on shipments of wheat, corn, oats, flour and pork before winter’s ice clogged the river.

By debate day, Quincy’s streets had been left muddy by sixteen days of rain. It didn’t stop the partisans, who by midday numbered in the thousands at Washington Park. Steamboats from Hannibal, Missouri, and Keokuk, Iowa, delivered hundreds more who had come to hear Lincoln and Douglas in a debate focused on the single issue of slavery. Quincyans, separated by the Mississippi from the slave state of Missouri, generally abhorred slavery, and some had spirited slaves to freedom in the city’s stops along the Underground Railroad. As a Supreme Court judge assigned to Quincy, Douglas had found one of them, Dr. Richard Eells, guilty under the fugitive slave law of aiding a runaway slave.

The spectators, good-naturedly jousting verbally with one another, patiently awaited the

Quincy Riverfront (circa 1850s)

Lincoln’s reception was as enthusiastic, if more mundane. Cheering throngs, a cannon salute and a chorus of ladies singing, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” greeted Lincoln that Wednesday morning as he stepped from a passenger train that had brought him from Macomb. Lincoln had hoped to walk to the home of his friends Orville and Eliza Browning at Eighth and Hampshire Streets for some rest before the debate that afternoon. But Quincy Republican Abraham Jonas’s welcoming committee had arranged a procession through the “city’s principle streets” before they would leave Lincoln at the Brownings in time for lunch.

The Quincy House
Southeast Corner, Fourth and Maine

Click here for the complete text of the Lincoln-Douglas Quincy Debate,
Courtesy National Park Service.

start of the debate, delayed by a broken platform railing, then a bench that collapsed under the weight of several women. Rising from his seat on the platform built in front of the columned Adams County

courthouse, Lincoln, his voice high and somewhat shrill, opened the debate. He would repeat what he had said in earlier stops: although he did not believe the Negro equal in all respects, he saw “no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated by the Declaration of Independence. . . .”