What were the long term effects of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a series of public speeches between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the election campaign for the Senate in 1858.

Lincoln was the candidate for the Republican Party, which had only been founded four years earlier, and Douglas was again in the Democratic Party. He had already won his senate seat in the 1846 elections. The election campaign lasted from July to November 1858, and both candidates covered several thousand kilometers within Illinois. Each gave about sixty speeches and dozens of shorter, ad hoc speeches. The election campaign is evidence of the extraordinary extent of participatory democracy that the Midwest of the United States had in the last decade before the Civil War.

The campaign ended with Lincoln's defeat. On December 5, 1859, Douglas was re-elected to the Senate. In the long run, however, the debates were a success for Lincoln, because the nationwide prominence they brought to the previously little-known Illinois lawyer gave him the chance to be elected President of the United States two years later.