Words as Weapons: How Debate Built the American Republic

In 1858, crowds of up to 20,000 people traveled by foot, horse, and rail to small Illinois towns to watch two men argue. They stood for three hours in open fields while Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated the future of slavery. This was not unusual for 19th century America. Debate was mass entertainment, civic ritual, and the primary way citizens engaged with the ideas shaping their nation.

Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance at Ottawa, 15,000 at Freeport, 16,000 to 18,000 at Galesburg. The audiences cheered, booed, laughed, and shouted questions at the candidates "as if they were prizefighters," according to one account.

What has become unusual is how completely we have forgotten this tradition. The infrastructure that once made debate central to American life has almost entirely disappeared.

To understand what we have lost, we need to understand what we once had.

The Colonial Inheritance

American debate began as an import from British education. Colonial colleges like Harvard and Yale required students to participate in "syllogistic disputations," highly structured conversations in Latin that followed strict rules of logic. These exercises focused on the nature of rhetoric itself rather than practical questions. Students reportedly found them tedious. One Harvard student described them as "packs of profound nonsense."

Benjamin Wadsworth, after becoming Harvard's president in 1725, encountered such difficulty getting students to cooperate that within ten years the number of required disputations was halved. The last recorded syllogistic disputation at any university was held at Brown University in 1809.

But by then, a more vital form of debate had emerged. In 1747, Yale introduced "forensic disputations," which allowed students to argue about real issues. Unlike the abstract Latin exercises, forensic disputations "often veered towards the hot-button issues of the time." A list of topics debated at Yale in 1832 included questions about Native American civil rights, universal suffrage, and capital punishment.

"It comes in course for me to affirm...Whatever the question may be, I must support it."

— John Quincy Adams, in a 1786 letter to his mother about his Harvard disputations

This switch-sides requirement proved foundational. American debate, from its earliest days, trained people to argue positions they did not personally hold. The skill being developed was not partisan advocacy but the ability to understand and articulate multiple perspectives on contested questions.

Benjamin Franklin's Experiment

Outside the universities, debate took root in a different form. In 1727, a 21-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin gathered twelve friends in Philadelphia to form what he called the Junto, also known as the Leather Apron Club. The members were tradesmen and artisans: a glazier, a cobbler, a surveyor, a scrivener. They met every Friday evening to discuss "morals, politics, or natural philosophy."

Franklin designed the Junto with specific rules to govern discussion. In his autobiography, he explained:

"Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory."

To prevent arguments from becoming heated, "all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were...made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties."

The Junto lasted 38 years. More importantly, it spawned institutions that still exist. The need of Junto members for access to books led Franklin to organize America's first lending library in 1731. Their discussions about civic improvement led to volunteer fire companies, a night watch for public safety, and eventually the American Philosophical Society.

Franklin's innovation was to create structured debate among ordinary working people who had no access to college education. The form was democratic. The discussions were practical. And the results were tangible improvements to civic life.

The Rise of Literary Societies

The golden age of American debate began in the late 18th century with the founding of collegiate literary societies. Yale's Linonian Society was founded in 1753 "for the promotion of Friendship, and social intercourse, and...the advancement of Literature." Rivals followed:

• Brothers in Unity at Yale (1768)
• Phi Beta Kappa at William & Mary (1776) — first meeting December 5, 1776, in the midst of the Revolution
• American Whig and Cliosophic Societies at Princeton
• Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies at University of North Carolina

According to the historian Thomas Harding, "College societies were the training grounds for men in public affairs in the nineteenth century." The societies "were virtually little republics, with their own laws and a democratically elected student administration." They operated independently of faculty control and often took on controversial topics that the official curriculum avoided.

Many early prominent Americans passed through these societies. Nathan Hale belonged to Linonia (class of 1773). Noah Webster was a member (1778), as was Eli Whitney (1789), John C. Calhoun (1804), and Samuel Morse (1810). The societies did not merely discuss ideas; they incubated future leaders.

By mid-century, nearly every American college had at least one literary society, and most had two or more competing organizations. The competition was fierce. At Columbia University, the Peithologian and Philolexian societies "maintained a friendly and highly charged rivalry." George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary that a Philolexian gathering was disrupted by "those rascally Peithologians," and "firecrackers and stink bombs, tossed into the midst of each other's meetings, were usually the weapons of choice."

Libraries, Lectures, and Community

The literary societies built substantial infrastructure. Many maintained their own libraries, which "at a number of Northern colleges...were larger than the college libraries." These collections were often superior in quality to the official college holdings.

The societies also hosted public events. In the years before the Civil War, they sponsored addresses by politicians and dignitaries. The most famous of these addresses is Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar," delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837.

Most importantly, the societies opened their debates to the community. At the University of Iowa, when the Zetagathian Society voted in 1861 to make their meetings public:

"Community enthusiasm was immediate and substantial. In fact, there were often so many people in attendance that societies on campus were forced to rent theater space to accommodate the audience. Individuals would even travel, by foot, through the cold Iowa City snow for an evening of debate."

When debates became particularly contentious, "audience members were driven to shouting and fighting for their 'side' of the argument. The societies turned to hired bodyguards to control the crowd." Debate was not a spectator sport in the passive sense. Audiences participated. They cared.

The Lincoln-Douglas Moment

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 represent the peak of American debate as public spectacle. The format seems impossible by modern standards: one candidate spoke for an hour, then the other responded for an hour and a half, then the first candidate delivered a thirty-minute rebuttal. Three hours of sustained argument, outdoors, with no amplification.

The crowds came anyway: 12,000 in Ottawa, 15,000 in Freeport (twice the town's population), 16,000 to 18,000 in Galesburg, 12,000 in Quincy.

At Freeport, spectators "flocked into a vacant lot near the banks of the Pecatonica River, where another crude wooden platform had been erected between two trees." One contemporary recalled that audiences "found themselves almost mesmerized, standing hour after hour gripped by oratory."

Douglas traveled in a private train fitted with a cannon that fired a shot every time he arrived. Lincoln traveled by railroad, carriage, or boat, often sitting atop a Conestoga wagon accompanied by an honor guard of farmers.

Thanks to stenographers and the telegraph, the arguments reached a national audience within days. Lincoln lost the Senate race but won national recognition. He edited the debate transcripts and published them as a book, which helped him secure the Republican nomination for president in 1860.

What the Societies Taught

The literary societies trained their members in specific skills:

The Beginning of the End

The Civil War disrupted the literary societies. But the real decline came afterward, driven by changes in campus social life. Students began to organize smaller, more exclusive groups that evolved into Greek letter fraternities.

The fraternities adopted the forms of literary societies but limited membership and added secrecy. They offered something the large literary societies could not: intimacy, exclusivity, and social status. Competition from fraternities, athletics, and other entertainments drew students away from the debate halls.

By the 1880s, many literary societies had dissolved or existed in name only. The skills they taught migrated into new forms: intercollegiate debate leagues, high school forensics, law school moot courts. But something important was lost.

The Foundation

The period from the founding era through the Civil War established debate as central to American civic culture:

• Franklin's Junto showed that ordinary citizens could organize structured intellectual exchange for practical benefit.
• The literary societies showed that young people could govern themselves and engage with controversial issues.
• The Lincoln-Douglas debates showed that the American public had an appetite for sustained, serious argument about questions that mattered.

But the infrastructure existed. Americans knew how to argue with each other in structured settings. They valued the skill. They participated, not just as spectators, but as practitioners.

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In the next installment, we will trace how this infrastructure evolved from the 1890s through 1960: the professionalization of debate, the creation of the National Forensic League, and the emergence of presidential debates as the new public spectacle.

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Sources and Further Reading

• On Literary Societies: Thomas S. Harding, College Literary Societies (Pageant Press, 1971)
• On Benjamin Franklin: Franklin's Autobiography; Leo LeMay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin
• On Lincoln-Douglas: Allen Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America