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Third Joint Debate at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858

"Selected quotations" or "Excerpts"  by B.F. McClerren and Robert Sterling for the Lincoln-Douglas Debate Museum, Charleston, Illinois   SAD is Stephen A.Douglas, AL is Abraham Lincoln.

SAD-- We have risen from a weak, feeble power, till we have become the terror and the admiration of the civilized world, and all this had been done under a constitution which Mr. Lincoln says, in substance, is a violation of the law of God, and under a union divided into free and slave States, and Mr. Lincoln says because of such division the house cannot stand.

AL-- Judge Douglas says why cannot this Union endure permanently, half slave and half free. I say that Judge Douglas and his friends have changed the policy from the way in which our fathers originally place it. I say the way in which our fathers left this subject, slavery was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say that when our government was first established it was the policy of the government to prohibit the spread or extension of slavery into the territories of the United States where it did not then exist.

Full Text of the Debate (all parts)