emotions it stirred in the principals and followers on both sides,
there can be no question. But the real worth of the debates cannot
be judged merely by popular tradition, particularly when it is re-
membered that that tradition is today largely the tradition of the
descendants of Lincoln' camp, for the debates proved the spring-
board whose momentum carried Lincoln to the White House and
to the chief responsibility for the nation' safety in its greatest
crisis. This tradition, finding a dramatic foil for its hero in Douglas,
has pictured Douglas as a brilliant but unscrupulous "dough-face,"
a "northern man with southern principles," whose high-flying
career was finally brought to earth by Lincoln' supreme political
logic. According to this view, what Socrates was to the Sophists,
what Sherlock Holmes was to Dr. Moriarty, what St. George was
to the dragon, so Lincoln was to Douglas. The analogy with
Socrates is perhaps the most apt, when it is remembered that
Lincoln is thought to have wrought Douglas' downfall with a cer-
tain famous question.

But this view of the debates is not regarded highly today by
leading authorities of the historical profession. "Solely on their
merits," writes Albert J. Beveridge in a classic biography pub-
lished in 1928 "the debates themselves deserve little notice." This
judgment is repeated nearly twenty years later by James G.
Randall, widely regarded today as the foremost academic author-
ity on Lincoln, who also quotes with approval the opinion of
George Fort Milton, the leading biographer and advocate of the
cause of Douglas. "Judged as debates, they do not measure up
to their reputation. On neither side did the dialectic compare with
that in the debates between Webster, Hayne, and Calhoun." ¹

If this were a mere dash of critical cold water upon a piece
of folklore, it would perhaps not much matter. The literary
insignificance of campaign speeches is notorious, and the debates
were, after all, campaign speeches. Yet this agreement of more
recent opinion contrasts remarkably, not only with the folklore,
but with the mature and scholarly judgment of the more distant
past. James Ford Rhodes, writing in the early 1890', said that
Lincoln, in the campaign of 1858 as well as in his speeches on
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and on the Dred Scott
decision, had formulated "a body of Republican doctrine which in
consistency, cogency, and fitness can nowhere be equalled." And
Rhodes, who was the supreme admirer of the great apostle of
the Union, could write that "such clearness of statement and ir-

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