Although Bloomington did not host one of the seven momentous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, both candidates stopped in Bloomington during the campaign to deliver lengthy speeches.

At the time, Lincoln was the Republican challenger for the U.S. Senate seat held by Douglas.

The “Little Giant,” as Douglas was known, spoke in Bloomington on July 16, a little more than one month before for first great debate, which was held in Ottawa. During a three-week stretch between the second debate at Freeport and the third at Jonesboro, Lincoln was in Bloomington offering a withering rebuttal of Douglas and his embrace of slavery.

At stake, it might be said, was nothing less than the fate — or at least the soul — of the nation.

The seven debates occurred during a tumultuous period in the nation’s history. In 1854, Douglas played an instrumental role in shepherding through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which made “inoperative and void” the Missouri Compromise line banning slavery in northern territories. In its stead, Douglas trumpeted the idea of popular sovereignty whereby each new territory would decide whether or not to admit the practice of slavery.

The result was “Bleeding Kansas,” as pro- and anti-slave factions waged nasty, hit-and-run skirmishes for control of the territorial legislature and constitution. Perhaps more ominous than Kansas was the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that slaves were no different than other kinds of private property, and as such could be taken into any territory, even those deemed heretofore free. As Lincoln and Douglas criss-crossed the state by rail during the 1858 campaign, the threat of slavery’s expansion loomed large, not only in the formal debates immortalized in U.S. history, but in speeches delivered in Bloomington and elsewhere.

On July 16, several thousand gathered on the courthouse square to hear Sen. Douglas discourse for two-plus hours, a speech highlighted by a vigorous defense of popular sovereignty. Regarding Dred Scott, The Pantagraph reported that Douglas “considered it his duty to acquiesce in the decision of the Supreme Court, no matter what his private opinions might be.”

Lincoln, as was often the case with a Douglas speech, was in attendance! “Mr. L. held back for a little while, but the crowd finally succeeded in inducing him to come upon the stand,” noted The Pantagraph.

“This meeting,” Lincoln told those gathered, “was called by the friends of Judge Douglas, and it would be improper for me to address it.” Nonetheless, he promised to return to Bloomington and reply in earnest to “the Judge” and popular sovereignty. True to his word, Lincoln was back in Bloomington on Sept. 4, speaking before upwards of 7,000, estimates vary, on the courthouse square.

There could be no mistaking the diametrically opposed views of the two candidates when it came to slavery. Lincoln maintained that the Founding Fathers knew well the “peculiar institution” stood in opposition to the ideals of the young republic, and thus placed restrictions on its ability to expand. Yet with the Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln argued that “slave power” in the South had given the odious institution a second life, with the intent to make it “perpetual, national and universal.”

In Bloomington, according to The Pantagraph, he declared “that the body and soul of the Republican movement was to keep slavery away from where it does not exist,” nudging it ever closer to “ultimate extinction.”

Lincoln also assailed Douglas and his increasingly precarious defense of popular sovereignty, arguing that voting up or down the practice of enslaving another human ran counter to the very principles of self-government.

At this time Lincoln did not believe in (or at least publicly support) racial equality. That said, he still passionately argued for the inherent humanity and dignity of African Americans.  “Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color,” he said on the 1858 campaign trail, “still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black.”