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Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
That's still not quite correct. Lincoln's position was not to ban slavery until the very end of the Civil War. During his debates with Douglas (both for the senate, and later during the presidential election), Lincoln was always very clear that while he disliked slavery, he was not seeking to abolish it (at least, not until the rest of the country had chosen to do that by democratic means).
That's overstating the case a little. The South obviously preferred that new territories be slave territories, but generally they sought "parity" - as long as there were some slave territories to balance free territories, they didn't actually expect that every new territory would necessarily allow slavery. There might have been some Southerners who'd have liked to just dictate that all new territories would allow slavery by default, but mostly both sides spent the decades leading up to the Civil War trying to maintain some kind of balance (hence the multiple compromise bills, that of course ultimately failed).
The South increasingly moved towards the idea of secession - they had been threatening to secede for decades, whenever they didn't get their way. This was part of the reason why Lincoln and the Republicans (and Buchanan before him) didn't move more decisively when the South made secession noises when it became apparent Lincoln had won. It sounded very much like "Oh, this again." But it should also be said that the South did not actually expect to have to fight a total war against the North. When the war began, both sides thought it would be brief; the North expected the South to be quickly brought back into line after a few token battles and then some more compromises; the South expected the North to let them go once they demonstrated they were really serious.
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
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