Alice Mansell on “The First Lincoln-Douglas Debate”

Who made the Lincoln-Douglas Debates happen and how did the Debates quickly become known coast to coast? Meet two people who sat on the debates’ first podium in Ottawa, Illinois. Judge Caton, the first lawyer in Chicago, the “King of the Telegraph” in the Midwest and an Illinois Supreme Court justice with a country home/deer park close to Ottawa; and Mr. Hossack who shipped the first wheat from Ottawa to Chicago on the new I&M canal he helped to build, and was convicted the next year for harboring a runaway slave after many years of his Ottawa home being a stop on the Underground Railway.

Alice Mansell is a business owner and lawyer who majored in physical sciences and history in college.