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18581776 Club

Lincoln and Douglas meet on an outdoor platform in Ottawa; 12,000 show up

Three hours of argument over slavery's spread west, with a Senate seat and a stenographer's pencil deciding what the nation reads tomorrow.

By August 1858, the fight over slavery in the western territories had split the old parties and made Stephen Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty the central question in Illinois politics. On August 21, in Ottawa, Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln met for the first of seven debates for Douglas's U.S. Senate seat. Some 12,000 people stood in the afternoon heat as Douglas accused Lincoln of abolitionism and Lincoln answered that popular sovereignty would spread slavery rather than contain it. Runners rushed the stenographers' notes to trains bound for Chicago, and within hours the exchange was being telegraphed to newspapers across the country east of the Rockies…

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More from August 21
1959

Eisenhower signs the proclamation: Hawaii is now the 50th state

The order follows a territorial vote in which 94 percent said yes to joining the Union.
1968

Marine Corps' first Black Medal of Honor recipient is honored in Washington

Eighteen months after he smothered a grenade to save his platoon, James Anderson Jr.'s parents accept the medal in his place.
1944

Delegates gather at a Georgetown estate to sketch the peace that follows the war

Cordell Hull opens the talks that will draft the blueprint for a new world body.
19931776 Club
The spacecraft was set to switch on its transmitter for orbital insertion; it never called home.
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Read the full August 21 edition →Everything that happened on August 21 →
More from Expansion & Antebellum
1846

Congress declares war on Mexico; Polk tells the nation its blood was shed on its own soil

The vote formalizes three weeks of open conflict rooted in a disputed border, the annexation of Texas, and a decade of unresolved claims between two nations.
1854

Pierce signs the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Missouri Compromise's thirty-four-year line is gone

Douglas's "popular sovereignty" doctrine now lets settlers in both territories vote on slavery themselves, erasing the 36°30' ban that has held since 1820.
1846

Thirty-three armed settlers seize Sonoma before dawn; California declares itself a republic

General Vallejo is taken prisoner in his own home, 170 government horses are seized, and a hand-sewn bear flag now flies over the barracks.
1859

Captain Brooks claims a mid-Pacific atoll for the United States; he calls it the Middlebrook Islands

The sealing ship Gambia raised the flag under the Guano Islands Act, planting a U.S. claim a third of the way between Honolulu and Tokyo.
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