Care must be taken not to confound the formally declared attitude of
the Republican Party with that of the Abolitionists. The exact
position of many of the leading anti-slavery men of the period is not
always easy to determine. Garrison and Phillips were, of course,
Abolitionists. Sumner and Chase might be classed as belonging to
either or both—Republicans and Abolitionists. "Yet," says Professor
A. B. Hart, "two such conspicuous champions of anti-slavery as John
Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln always said that they were not
Abolitionists."[283]
Alluding to the extra-constitutional measures advocated by the
Abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln in his speech at Quincy, Ill., October 13,
1858, said:
"If there be any man in the Republican Party who is impatient over
the necessity springing from its (slavery's) actual presence, and is
impatient of the constitutional guarantees thrown around it, and
would act in disregard of these, he too is misplaced, standing with
us. He will find his place somewhere else; for we have a due regard,
so far as we are capable of understanding them, for all these
things."[284]
So too with respect to armed invasions and the attempt of John Brown
and his abettors to precipitate servile insurrection.
Mr. Lincoln, in his speech at Cooper Union, New York, February 27th,
1860, said:
"You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny
it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown
was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single
Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise."[285]... Continuing, he
said: "John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave
insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt
among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact,
it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw
plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy,
corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the
assassination of kings and emperors."[286]