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Party leaders and Republican newspaper editors urged him to stop being defensive and attack Douglas, as he had throughout the summer on the campaign trail.

That first debate and the enormous press coverage it attracted changed the nature of the campaign, too. The crowds of both men increased in size, especially Lincoln’s. Douglas introduced a question-and-answer format to his campaign, tackling any and all questions from the audience after he finished speaking. The senator also began to shake hands with hundreds of cheering people in the crowds at his campaign stops, adding an appreciated personal touch to his appearance.

Douglas was also determined to let every audience know that his remarks on slavery and popular sovereignty in the debates reflected his convictions, so he repeated them again and again. He told one crowd, “I stand by my principles and follow them to their logical conclusion, and I will not depart from them either to the right or to the left to flatter one section or the other… I have acted honestly and faithfully in my political course.”
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The reception for the two candidates at their second debate—in Freeport, a tiny town of five thousand in northern Illinois—six days later dwarfed the outpouring at Ottawa. It seemed as if all the people that lived in Illinois had caught “debate fever.” Long trains filled with thousands of supporters for both men began arriving at nine in the morning and the streets of the town were overflowing with people. The train from Amboy, Dixon, and Polo, with Lincoln on board, carried twelve cars and two thousand people. The train from Galena carried eight cars, the train from Marengo and Rockford had eighteen cars, all of them overcrowded with loud supporters of the two candidates. The Carrol County Lincoln Club held one parade and the Galena Lincoln Club held another. Local Republicans fired off several cannon when Lincoln emerged from the train. He was greeted with huge banners such as “Lincoln the Giant Killer” and “All Men Are Created Equal.”

The Douglas supporters arrived by every mode of transportation possible and held similarly loud parades throughout the morning. Douglas himself had arrived the night before and was met by hundreds of well-wishers who staged a torchlight parade for him. Organizers and press estimated the size of the debate crowd at between fifteen and twenty thousand—quadruple the size of the entire community. A reporter wrote, “All the main streets, backroads, lanes, and byways of Freeport appeared to be literally alive with men, and the suburbs for a long distance around were filled with vehicles of all descriptions.”

The weather was not good. It had been cloudy all morning, chilly and damp, with intermittent rain, and the sun rarely broke through. Organizers breathed a sigh of relief when, just before the debates began at two o’clock, the rain stopped.

Both men were greeted with sustained roars from the crowd. Lincoln received an especially tumultuous ovation from the overly Republican audience when he arrived seated on a Conestoga wagon pulled by six large white horses at the head of a parade full of ardent supporters.
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Lincoln needed to win the second debate and was certain that he would. Freeport was a stronghold for the antislavery movement, the Republicans, and Lincoln. The crowd would be on his side. He also had opportunity, because Douglas had asked him several questions at Ottawa that he now had to answer. That opened the door for him to query Douglas and gave him the chance to pin the Judge down on his view of the territories and slavery. If it was acceptable for the residents of Kansas or any territory to reject slavery when they adapted a constitution and became a state, was it also acceptable for them to approve of it?

Lincoln knew how Douglas would answer the question; he would defend the right of territories to either approve or disapprove of slavery—his familiar popular sovereignty argument. The Judge had been answering the question the same way since 1856 and never wavered in his defense of that belief. He had said in a hundred places but in the same way: “Every people ought to possess the right of forming and regulating their own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way.” Several months before, on July 18 in a speech at Springfield, Douglas had stated his position yet again.
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Lincoln also knew that by forcing him to answer, Douglas would become defensive, bristling at yet another attack on his stand, and respond with confidence, as he had done for years. “I never dodge a question. I never shrink from any responsibility. I never hesitate to give an unpopular vote or to meet an indignant community, when I know that I am right,” he was quoted as stating in the
National Intelligencer
.
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Lincoln’s advisers were against raising the question at Freeport because Douglas’s expected answer—that territorial voters could bar slavery—might win him the Illinois Senate race. True, Lincoln answered, but “I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be president, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”
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He could never be president, Lincoln told them, because if Douglas answered yes in such a public forum, and in front of so many reporters from around the United States, the Southerners would turn on him and he could lose half the country’s electoral votes in a presidential election; the reaction might be so great that he might even lose the 1860 Democratic nomination.

At Freeport, Lincoln began by answering Douglas’s queries, telling the crowd that he did not favor the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. He was against slavery in the territories, and he made it clear that under no circumstances could any territory in any way be allowed to permit it. The answer, on top of his well-known reluctant acceptance of slavery in the Southern states, made his position clear.

Lincoln then astonished the gathering by providing incontrovertible proof that Douglas’s charges made in the first debate at Ottawa were not true. Douglas had contended that the Republican Party of Illinois had passed abolitionist resolutions in their state convention in 1854 at Springfield, supported by Lincoln. The resolutions had been passed, but by other parties and in Kane County, not at any Republican convention—and Lincoln had not been at the Kane County meeting and had nothing to do with those in attendance. Douglas was shaken; he had been given bad information.

Lincoln berated Douglas for the false accusations. He reminded the crowd what an esteemed position the Judge held as a U.S. senator, a man “of worldwide renown,” and then skewered him, charging that it “is most extraordinary that he should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary or of prudence to himself, as to venture on the assertion of that which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false…”
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Lincoln then asked Douglas, “Can the people of the United States Territory in any legal way, against the will of one citizen, exclude slavery from their limits, previous to the formation of the state constitution?”

Douglas answered, as Lincoln knew he would, by defending the will of the people to do what they wanted about slavery in the territories. Douglas stated yet again that residents of a territory could approve slavery. However, if they so chose, those territorial residents could also prohibit slavery. He reminded all gathered there that this view was based on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, his own bill, cheered at the time by proslavery forces. Now he told the crowd that voters in a territory could approve slavery or ban it; it made no difference to him.
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His answer was branded “the Freeport Doctrine” and was promulgated by the Republicans to show that Douglas believed the same way Lincoln did about slavery in the territories and to hurt his credibility with Southerners and Southern-leaning residents in the lower part of Illinois. In fact, though, the historical “Freeport Doctrine” was no different from anything else Douglas had said over the previous two years. Lincoln’s skill was in baiting him into stating it at an important public forum. Many have claimed that Lincoln somehow tricked Douglas into his answer. He had not; he forced him into stating it clearly in front of an enormous crowd, and journalists reported the answer throughout the nation.

The applause for Lincoln at the end of the Freeport debate was deafening. He had forced Douglas to endorse popular sovereignty everywhere and firmly positioned himself as a public figure who grudgingly approved of slavery where it was in the United States, but was determined to halt its advance in the territories. He was at times serious and at times witty. His performance was far superior to that at Ottawa. Lincoln’s supporters were thrilled. Wrote a Republican journalist, “[Douglas] was completely wiped out and annihilated.”
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The remaining five debates did little to illuminate issues for the public; the two candidates did not say anything more than they had at the first two debates and in their many speeches throughout the summer and fall. The third was in the far southern part of Illinois, actually below the Mason-Dixon Line, at tiny Jonesboro, held at the Union County fairgrounds. This was Douglas’s country and Lincoln side-stepped just about all of the Judge’s attempts to get him on record about his antislavery views. It mattered little; less than two thousand people turned out.

In the fourth debate, at Charleston, again shoring up his position as a moderate on slavery who was not interested in forcing anyone to fraternize with blacks, Lincoln told the crowd, “I am not, or have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…of making voters or jurors of Negroes, not of qualifying them to hold office, not to intermarry with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” He added that the white race was superior to the black race and that he did not foresee himself or his friends ever marrying any blacks.
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The debates had been planned to run from the middle of August through late October in order to keep up public interest. In between each debate, the two candidates traveled extensively. The debates and the travel took their toll on Douglas, as could be expected of any candidate who was completing a grueling campaign, and rumors that he had returned to drink during the autumn surfaced often. He was clearly exhausted by the time the Senate race entered its last weeks and it showed in the final debates. One man in Jonesboro said that he had trouble hearing Douglas. A reporter wrote at Jonesboro that Douglas had a “desolate look” and that he “looked very much worse for wear.” The reporter added that “bad whisky and wear and tear of conscience have had their effect. He speaks very slowly, making a distinct pause at the end of each word.” In the last debate, at Alton, Douglas was so hoarse that he had trouble speaking and those beyond the front rows of the crowd complained that they could not hear him.

Lincoln, though, seemed to gain a second wind during the last weeks. He had far more energy than Douglas and even more than he had exhibited throughout the summer. His jokes were funnier, his speeches crisper and better organized, and he seemed full of passion. One man wrote that in the last few debates Douglas had rambled and lost his concentration, but Lincoln had not. “[He] kept strictly to the question at issue, and no one could doubt that the cause for which he was speaking was the only thing he had at heart.”
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In fact, Lincoln was not only winning the battle against campaign fatigue, but becoming a demonstrably stronger speaker, debater, and public presence at the same time the Judge was fading. In their last three encounters, Lincoln, looking ebullient and full of fire, continually blasted Douglas as part of the national slavery conspiracy and for his mistaken charges that Lincoln was at the Kane County convention. He charged that the Judge had misquoted him in the debates and on the campaign trail, that he had failed to put forward intelligent policies on slavery, and that he had, in fact, abandoned the principles of the Declaration of Independence. At Galesburg, using one of Henry Clay’s favorite lines, he said that Douglas “is blowing out the moral lights around us” and cared more for jingoistic foreign adventures in Mexico and South America than he did problems in the United States. Finally, in the last of the debates, at Alton, Lincoln ended with a glorious flourish, telling the overflowing audience—which swarmed the intersection of Broadway and Market Streets where the debate platform had been erected—that the campaign was about slavery and whether it was right or wrong.

Lincoln said, “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

Lincoln paused, and then went on. “It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king, who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
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Crowds who saw him in his appearances throughout the state in the last days of September and during October marveled at his energy and determination. His enthusiasm even rivaled that of the enormously popular William Seward, not running but campaigning for the Republican ticket in New York.

In the final debates, Lincoln made frequent use of his famous humor. At Charleston on September 18, he told the crowd that controversial issues such as black equality and racial intermarriage were local and would be decided by the state legislature. Then, eyes twinkling, he quickly added that, “And as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching, I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the state legislature where he can fight the measures.”