Page "Lincoln–Douglas debates" Paragraph 10

The main theme of the debates was slavery, especially the issue of slavery's expansion into the territories.

It was Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and replaced it with the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which meant that the people of a territory could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.

Lincoln said that popular sovereignty would nationalize and perpetuate slavery.

Douglas argued that both Whigs and Democrats believed in popular sovereignty and that the Compromise of 1850 was an example of this.

Lincoln said that the national policy was to limit the spread of slavery, and mentioned ( both at Jonesboro and later in his Cooper Union Address ) the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery from a large part of the modern-day Midwest, as an example of this policy.

The Compromise of 1850 allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for or against slavery, but it also allowed the admission of California as a free state, reduced the size of the slave state of Texas by adjusting the boundary, and ended the slave trade ( but not slavery itself ) in the District of Columbia.

In return, the South got a stronger fugitive slave law than the version mentioned in the Constitution.

Whereas Douglas said that the Compromise of 1850 replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri, Lincoln said that this was false, and that Popular Sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision were a departure from the policies of the past that would nationalize slavery.