ABSTRACT
No democracy without debate: surely that must be our ethos. President Lincoln, who championed “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,”1 taught us that debate is democracy’s lifeblood. As a candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois in 1858 from a new third party, he met Democrat Stephen Douglas in eight raucous debates “before huge, ardent audiences” and participated in “twenty-one hours of speeches, rebuttals, and rejoinders-all punctuated by choruses of cheers and jeers.”2 Lincoln’s loss to Douglas in the state legislature’s selection of a Senator did not render his campaign or these lively exchanges a waste of time. Based on the antislavery politics he spelled out in the heat of argument, Lincoln went on to win the White House two years later.3
