Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Harry Jaffa, author of the classic work, Crisis of the House Divided, describes how the most important issues in western civilization itself proved central to the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.
Seven towns in central and southern Illinois, none then or since, a metropolis of any particular note, and audiences who rode in from the surrounding farms, spread picnics, had some hard cider, and then sat down to listen. And what did they hear? The greatest debate of the ages.
It was a question of whether the people make the moral law or the moral law makes the people.