That may be the more relevant point, but I was just addressing the narrower issue of whether Lincoln mentioned the Constitutionality of a national bank in any debates. My narrow point was that McPherson was technicallly inaccurate when he stated in Battle Cry (page 182) that "banks ... received not a word in [the Lincoln-Douglas] debates."
Here's what Lincoln stated in the Ottawa debate:
"I have said that I have often heard [Douglas] approve of Jackson's course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a National Bank constitutional. He says, I did not hear him say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which affirms that Congress cannot charter a National Bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank."
The same argument was made by Lincoln in Galesburg (where I was born 100 years too late to hear it), and Douglas finally responded to that argument thusly:
"He has cited General Jackson in justification of the war he is making on the decision of the court. Mr. Lincoln misunderstands the history of the country, if he believes there is any parallel in the two cases. It is true that the Supreme Court once decided that if a Bank of the United States was a necessary fiscal agent of the Government, it was Constitutional, and if not, that it was unconstitutional, and also, that whether or not it was necessary for that purpose, was a political question for Congress and not a judicial one for the courts to determine. Hence the court would not determine the bank unconstitutional. Jackson respected the decision, obeyed the law, executed it and carried it into effect during its existence; but after the charter of the bank expired and a proposition was made to create a new bank, General Jackson said, "it is unnecessary and improper, and, therefore, I am against it on Constitutional grounds as well as those of expediency." Is Congress bound to pass every act that is Constitutional? Why, there are a thousand things that are Constitutional, but yet are inexpedient and unnecessary, and you surely would not vote for them merely because you had the right to? And because General Jackson would not do a thing which he had a right to do, but did not deem expedient or proper, Mr. Lincoln is going to justify himself in doing that which he has no right to do. I ask him, whether he is not bound to respect and obey the decisions of the Supreme Court as well as me?"
Again, I am not asserting that anything was said by Lincoln or Douglass in their debates regarding banks (or anything else) that was unrelated to their discussion of slavery issues (which so thoroughly dominated their debates that any other subject was merely of footnote status). And certainly DiLorenzo is way out in fantasyland in contending that "protectionist tariffs, tax subsidies to corporations, and centralized banking ... [are] what [Lincoln] and the ... Republicans wanted a centralized government for."
Radical Republicans wanted most of all to abolish slavery as soon as possible, and Lincoln, though a moderate who hoped that abolition could be accomplished gradually by converting Southern political leaders into enlightened Jeffersonians, in the end became a de facto radical due to circumstances beyond his control (i.e. Southern militant bullheadedness).
Of course, responding to Southern militant bullheadedness was an expensive proposition, and tariffs were raised to pay for the war (whereas the Confederates relied on the cruelest tax -- inflation). Nevertheless, tariff revenue during the war never reached the percentage of GNP it had reached during the War of 1812, and it dropped steadily off the table after the Civil War. (Source.) DiLorenzo ignores this important contextual point, and he also ignores the fact that the Morill tariff was passed as a way to deal with the Buchanan/Breckinridge federal deficit.
Perhaps more importantly, DiLorenzo, who is supposedly an economist, curiously ignores the relative economic magnitude of the slavery issue. Since the Confederates in 1860 placed a value of $3 billion on the slaves they held, any claims by DiLorenzo, Lew Rockwell, et al. about tariffs being a major factor in the Civil War are laughable, since even when tariff rates topped out during the height of the Civil War, they only brought in a small fraction of the annual return Southern slaveholders received as a result of their continued use of $3 billion worth of slave labor. So even if you ignore the social value the Confederates placed on perpetuating slavery, the economic threat posed by the abolitionists was enormous.
Lincoln of course realized this, and that is why he tried to come up with some way to soften the blow of abolition to the slaveholders in order to do everything practical to avoid a civil war. Colonialization of liberated refugees may sound like a pretty flaky scheme in the detached comfort of retrospect, but such a scheme was in fact actually implemented in Israel in the aftermath of World War II. Lincoln also proposed paying compensation to slaveholders as part of abolition, but that was rejected even in the border states at a time when any slaveholders in semi-contact with reality should have realized it was the best deal they would ever receive.
It seems that Southern slaveholders were the hopeless addicts of the 19th Century. DiLorenzo and their other heirs apparent appear to be just as hopeless when it comes to a reasonable discussion of the Civil War era.
Perhaps the "not a word" business has the slightest rhetorical overkill in it. But really, not much. Is it not true that Lincoln utters not a word in the debates whose purpose is to make an economic point for its own sake? Do you think the text you posted is an exception to that statement? The immediate context of the remark you cite makes it clear that Lincoln is only talking about it in order to convict Douglas of inconsistency in his demand that Republicans accept Dred Scott. There is not even the slightest aside about the bank issue in itself, of the sort: "which decision, by the way, I support."
I'm all for being fair, but it seems to me on the question of whether Lincoln discussed economics as a point of debate in the Lincoln Douglas debates, the answer is simply and absolutely, no.
Please don't think me grumpy about your post. I just don't think we need to help DiLorenzo escape from the being convicted as an absolute liar on this point.