This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

In 1858, a series of debates took place in Illinois that turned a one-time

and little-known trial lawyer and one-time one-term U.S. representative into the forefront of

American political life. We're talking about Abraham Lincoln. Here to tell the story of the

Lincoln-Douglas debates is Dr. Alan Gelsso,

a distinguished research scholar at Princeton University, and author of numerous books, including

Lincoln and Douglas, The Debates that Defined America. And we want to thank the Bill of Rights

Institute for allowing us to use this audio.

Let's get into the story.

Well, I think we really have to begin with the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, because that was the real trigger for Lincoln's emergence to national prominence.

He said himself that October that the passage of the Kansas

Nebraska Act, the previous May, took us by surprise. And he's speaking collectively of

northerners, of anti-slavery people. It took us by surprise. It astounded us. We were thunderstruck and stunned, and we reeled and fell in utter

confusion. But, he said, we rose each fighting, grasping, whatever he could first reach, a sigh,

the pitchfork, a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver, and we struck, he said,

in the direction of the sound, and we are rapidly closing in upon him. Well, him in this case was the

architect of the Kansas Nebraska bill, Stephen Arnold Douglas.

Lincoln always spoke of himself as being naturally opposed to slavery.

He also never urged direct action against it.

And the reason he never urged direct action against slavery,

before 1854 at least, was because he said the time will come and must come when there will not

be a single slave within the borders of this country. This is what he meant when he talked

...