Page 6 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • October 31, 2012 Area Groups stage replay of Lincoln-McClellan debate by John Koster Abraham Lincoln, who lost two elections in New Jersey, took on George McClellan, who carried the state in 1864 and later served as New Jersey’s governor, at the Brick House in Wyckoff for a replay of the 1864 campaign debate. McClellan, portrayed by Ken Hall, was up against more than an election contest. Not only was Lincoln a higher profile in American political and sentimental history than McClellan, even in New Jersey, but Hall was up against Robert Costello, who has been portraying Lincoln for longer than Lincoln was president. Against staggering odds, Hall put up a great fight with an ample knowledge of McClellan’s life and a sensitive and sympathetic understanding of his motives and beliefs. The debate, which followed lunch, went on for about 90 minutes. Two-thirds of the debate consisted of questions from the audience. While nobody was voting for a winner or a loser, the audience acknowledged that Hall was an extremely capable impersonator. Costello’s Lincoln remained indestructible but nobody who heard the debate would ever again write off McClellan as a lightweight. Little Mac and Honest Abe both impressed the audience. Each candidate introduced himself and then fielded questions from the audience. Joseph Truglio of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table was one of the first to ask a question. “At the end of the war, will the two Virginias be re-united?” Truglio asked. “No,” Abraham Lincoln said bluntly. Lincoln said West Virginians decided to leave the Old Dominion state when most of Virginia seceded, and that West Virginia would retain its internal independence. “I agree,” McClellan said. “It will be a separate state.” McClellan recalled how he had won his first victories, successfully defending West Virginia from the Confederates, and that these victories had brought him to Lincoln’s favorable attention (before they became political rivals). Kevin Collins of Saddle River asked Lincoln a question about the basis for the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln explained that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed only those slaves living in the Confederate states, whose secession from the Union had been an act of treason. Since the Constitution allowed the property of traitors to be confiscated, and since the courts had ruled that slaves were property, Lincoln said he, as president, had the right to confiscate the traitors’ property and free the slaves he had confiscated. “I am just taking their property and turning it loose,” Lincoln said. The differences between Lincoln and McClellan were both subtle and substantial, as the introduction and the debate (continued on page 17) Vickie Hall as Ellen McClellan, Ken Hall as General George McClellan, Jean Hildebrandt as the introductory speaker, and Robert Costello as President Abraham Lincoln.