"The greatest speech ever made in Illinois, and it puts Lincoln on the
track for the Presidency," was the comment made by enthusiastic
Republicans on Lincoln's speech before the Bloomington Convention.
Conscious that it was he who had put the breath of life into their
organization, the party instinctively turned to him as its leader. The
effect of this local recognition was at once perceptible in the
national organization. Less than three weeks after the delivery of the
Bloomington speech, the national convention of the Republican party
met in Philadelphia, June 17, to nominate candidates for the
Presidency and Vice-presidency. Lincoln's name was the second proposed
for the latter office, and on the first ballot he received one hundred
and ten votes. The news reached him at Urbana, Ill., where he was
attending court, one of his companions reading from a daily paper just
received from Chicago, the result of the ballot. The simple name
Lincoln was given, without the name of the man's State. Lincoln said
indifferently that he did not suppose it could be himself; and added
that there was "another great man" of the name, a man from
Massachusetts. The next day, however, he knew that it was himself to
whom the convention had given so strong an endorsement. He knew also
that the ticket chosen was Frémont and Dayton.
The campaign of the following summer and fall was one of intense
activity for Lincoln. In Illinois and the neighboring States he made
over fifty speeches, only fragments of which have been preserved. One
of the first important ones was delivered on July 4, 1856, at a great
mass meeting at Princeton, the home of the Lovejoys and the Bryants.
The people were still irritated by the outrages in Kansas and by the
attack on Sumner in the Senate, and the temptation to deliver a
stirring and indignant oration must have been strong. Lincoln's speech
was, however, a fine example of political wisdom, an historical
argument admirably calculated to convince his auditors that they were
right in their opposition to slavery extension, but so controlled and
sane that it would stir no impulsive radical to violence. There
probably was not uttered in the United States on that critical 4th of
July, 1856, when the very foundation of the government was in dispute
and the day itself seemed a mockery, a cooler, more logical speech
than this by the man who, a month before, had driven a convention so
nearly mad that the very reporters had forgotten to make notes. And
the temper of this Princeton speech Lincoln kept throughout the
campaign.
In spite of the valiant struggle of the Republicans, Buchanan was
elected; but Lincoln was in no way discouraged. The Republicans had
polled 1,341,264 votes in the country. In Illinois, they had given
Frémont nearly 100,000 votes, and they had elected their candidate for
governor, General Bissell. Lincoln turned from arguments to
encouragement and good counsel.
"All of us," he said at a Republican banquet in Chicago, a few weeks
after the election, "who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken
together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But in the late
contest we were divided between Frémont and Fillmore. Can we not come
together for the future? Let every one who really believes and is
resolved that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who
can conscientiously declare that in the last contest he had done what
he thought best--let every such one have charity to believe that every
other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones; let past
differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue let
us reinaugurate the good old 'central idea' of the republic. We can do
it. The human heart is with us; God is with us. We shall again be
able, not to declare that 'all States as States are equal,' nor yet
that 'all citizens as citizens are equal,' but to renew the broader,
better declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men
are created equal.'"
The spring of 1857 gave Lincoln a new line of argument. Buchanan was
scarcely in the Presidential chair before the Supreme Court, in the
decision of the Dred Scott case, declared that a negro could not sue
in the United States courts and that Congress could not prohibit
slavery in the Territories. This decision was such an evident advance
of the slave power that there was a violent uproar in the North.
Douglas went at once to Illinois to calm his constituents. "What," he
cried, "oppose the Supreme Court! is it not sacred? To resist it is
anarchy."
Lincoln met him fairly on the issue in a speech at Springfield in
June, 1857.
"We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to
and respect for the judicial department of government.... But we
think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that
made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we
can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.... If this
important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the
judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with
legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the
departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on
assumed historical facts which are not really true; or if, wanting in
some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had
there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then
might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to
acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it
wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not
resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat
it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the
country."
Let Douglas cry "awful," "anarchy," "revolution," as much as he would,
Lincoln's arguments against the Dred Scott decision appealed to common
sense and won him commendation all over the country. Even the radical
leaders of the party in the East--Seward, Sumner, Theodore
Parker--began to notice him, to read his speeches, to consider his
arguments.
With every month of 1857 Lincoln grew stronger, and his election in
Illinois as United States senatorial candidate in 1858 against Douglas
would have been insured if Douglas had not suddenly broken with
Buchanan and his party in a way which won him the hearty sympathy and
respect of a large part of the Republicans of the North. By a
flagrantly unfair vote the pro-slavery leaders of Kansas had secured
the adoption of the Lecompton Constitution allowing slavery in the
State. President Buchanan urged Congress to admit Kansas with her
bogus Constitution. Douglas, who would not sanction so base an
injustice, opposed the measure, voting with the Republicans steadily
against the admission. The Buchananists, outraged at what they called
"Douglas's apostasy," broke with him. Then it was that a part of the
Republican party, notably Horace Greeley at the head of the New York
"Tribune," struck by the boldness and nobility of Douglas's
opposition, began to hope to win him over from the Democrats to the
Republicans. Their first step was to counsel the leaders of their
party in Illinois to put up no candidate against Douglas for the
United States senatorship in 1858.
Lincoln saw this change on the part of the Republican leaders with
dismay. "Greeley is not doing me right," he said. "... I am a true
Republican, and have been tried already in the hottest part of the
anti-slavery fight; and yet I find him taking up Douglas, a veritable
dodger,--once a tool of the South, now its enemy,--and pushing him to
the front." He grew so restless over the returning popularity of
Douglas among the Republicans that Herndon, his law-partner,
determined to go East to find out the real feeling of the Eastern
leaders towards Lincoln. Herndon had, for a long time, been in
correspondence with the leading abolitionists and had no difficulty in
getting interviews. The returns he brought back from his canvass were
not altogether reassuring. Seward, Sumner, Phillips, Garrison,
Beecher, Theodore Parker, all spoke favorably of Lincoln and Seward
sent him word that the Republicans would never take up so slippery a
quantity as Douglas had proved himself. But Greeley--the all-important
Greeley--was lukewarm. "The Republican standard is too high," he told
Herndon. "We want something practical.... Douglas is a brave man.
Forget the past and sustain the righteous." "Good God, righteous, eh!"
groaned Herndon in his letter to Lincoln.
But though the encouragement which came to Lincoln from the East in
the spring of 1858 was meagre, that which came from Illinois was
abundant. There the Republicans supported him in whole-hearted
devotion. In June, the State convention, meeting in Springfield to
nominate its candidate for Senator, declared that Abraham Lincoln was
its first and only choice as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas. The
press was jubilant. "Unanimity is a weak word," wrote the editor of
the Bloomington "Pantagraph," "to express the universal and intense
feeling of the convention. _Lincoln!_ LINCOLN!! LINCOLN!!! was the cry
everywhere, whenever the senatorship was alluded to. Delegates from
Chicago and from Cairo, from the Wabash and the Illinois, from the
north, the center, and the south, were alike fierce with enthusiasm,
whenever that loved name was breathed. Enemies at home and misjudging
friends abroad, who have looked for dissension among us on the
question of the senatorship, will please take notice that our
nomination is a unanimous one; and that, in the event of a Republican
majority in the next Legislature, no other name than Lincoln's will be
mentioned, or thought of, by a solitary Republican legislator. One
little incident in the convention was a pleasing illustration of the
universality of the Lincoln sentiment. Cook County had brought a
banner into the assemblage inscribed, 'Cook County for Abraham
Lincoln.' During a pause in the proceedings, a delegate from another
county rose and proposed, with the consent of the Cook County
delegation, 'to amend the banner by substituting for "Cook County" the
word which I hold in my hand,' at the same time unrolling a scroll,
and revealing the word 'Illinois' in huge capitals. The Cook
delegation promptly accepted the amendment, and amidst a perfect
hurricane of hurrahs, the banner was duly altered to express the
sentiment of the whole Republican party of the State, thus: 'Illinois
for Abraham Lincoln.'"
On the evening of the day of his nomination, Lincoln addressed his
constituents. The first paragraph of his speech gave the key to the
campaign he proposed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I
believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half
free. I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will
cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."
Then followed the famous charge of conspiracy against the slavery
advocates, the charge that Pierce, Buchanan, Chief Justice Taney, and
Douglas had been making a concerted effort to legalize the institution
of slavery "in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as
South." He marshaled one after another of the measures that the
pro-slavery leaders had secured in the past four years, and clinched
the argument by one of his inimitable illustrations.
"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we
know have been gotten out of different times and places and by
different workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James,[A] for
instance,--and we see these timbers joined together, and see they
exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and
mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the
different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a
piece too many or too few, not omitting even the scaffolding--or, if a
single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted
and prepared yet to bring such a piece in--in such a case we find it
impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and
James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked
upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was
struck."
The speech was severely criticised by Lincoln's friends. It was too
radical. It was sectional. He heard the complaints unmoved. "If I had
to draw a pen across my record," he said, one day, "and erase my whole
life from sight, and I had one poor gift of choice left as to what I
should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it
to the world unerased."
The speech, was, in fact, one of great political adroitness. It forced
Douglas to do exactly what he did not want to do in Illinois; explain
his own record during the past four years; explain the true meaning of
the Kansas-Nebraska bill; discuss the Dred Scott decision; say whether
or not he thought slavery so good a thing that the country could
afford to extend it instead of confining it where it would be in
course of gradual extinction. Douglas wanted the Republicans of
Illinois to follow Greeley's advice: "Forgive the past." He wanted to
make the most among them of his really noble revolt against the
attempt of his party to fasten an unjust constitution on Kansas.
Lincoln would not allow him to bask for an instant in the sun of that
revolt. He crowded him step by step through his party's record, and
compelled him to face what he called the "profound central truth" of
the Republican party, "slavery is wrong and ought to be dealt with as
wrong."
But it was at once evident that Douglas did not mean to
meet the issue squarely. He called the doctrine of Lincoln's
"house-divided-against-itself" speech "sectionalism"; his charge of
conspiracy "false"; his talk of the wrong of slavery extension
"abolitionism." This went on for a month. Then Lincoln resolved to
force Douglas to meet his arguments, and challenged him to a series of
joint debates. Douglas was not pleased. His reply to the challenge was
irritable, even slightly insolent. To those of his friends who talked
with him privately of the contest, he said: "I do not feel, between
you and me, that I want to go into this debate. The whole country
knows me, and has me measured. Lincoln, as regards myself, is
comparatively unknown, and if he gets the best of this debate,--and I
want to say he is the ablest man the Republicans have got,--I shall
lose everything and Lincoln will gain everything. Should I win, I
shall gain but little. I do not want to go into a debate with Abe."
Publicly, however, he carried off the prospect confidently, even
jauntily. "Mr. Lincoln," he said patronizingly, "is a kind, amiable,
intelligent gentleman." In the meantime his constituents boasted
loudly of the fine spectacle they were going to give the State--"the
Little Giant chawing up Old Abe!"
Many of Lincoln's friends looked forward to the encounter with
foreboding. Often, in spite of their best intentions, they showed
anxiety. "Shortly before the first debate came off at Ottawa," says
Judge H. W. Beckwith of Danville, Ill., "I passed the Chenery House,
then the principal hotel in Springfield. The lobby was crowded with
partisan leaders from various sections of the State, and Mr. Lincoln,
from his greater height, was seen above the surging mass that clung
about him like a swarm of bees to their ruler. He looked careworn, but
he met the crowd patiently and kindly, shaking hands, answering
questions, and receiving assurances of support. The day was warm, and
at the first chance he broke away and came out for a little fresh air,
wiping the sweat from his face.
"As he passed the door he saw me, and, taking my hand, inquired for
the health and views of his 'friends over in Vermilion County.' He was
assured they were wide awake, and further told that they looked
forward to the debate between him and Senator Douglas with deep
concern. From the shadow that went quickly over his face, the pained
look that came to give quickly way to a blaze of eyes and quiver of
lips, I felt that Mr. Lincoln had gone beneath my mere words and
caught my inner and current fears as to the result. And then, in a
forgiving, jocular way peculiar to him, he said, 'Sit down; I have a
moment to spare and will tell you a story.' Having been on his feet
for some time, he sat on the end of the stone steps leading into the
hotel door, while I stood closely fronting him.
"'You have,' he continued, 'seen two men about to fight?'
"'Yes, many times.'
"'Well, one of them brags about what he means to do. He jumps high in
the air, cracking his heels together, smites his fists, and wastes his
breath trying to scare everybody. You see the other fellow, he says
not a word,'--here Mr. Lincoln's voice and manner changed to great
earnestness, and repeating--'you see the other man says not a word.
His arms are at his side, his fists are closely doubled up, his head
is drawn to the shoulder, and his teeth are set firm together. He is
saving his wind for the fight, and as sure as it comes off he will win
it, or die a-trying.'
"He made no other comment, but arose, bade me good-by, and left me to
apply that illustration."
It was inevitable that Douglas's friends should be sanguine, Lincoln's
doubtful. The contrast between the two candidates was almost pathetic.
Senator Douglas was the most brilliant figure in the political life of
the day. Winning in personality, fearless as an advocate, magnetic in
eloquence, shrewd in political manoeuvring, he had every quality to
captivate the public. His resources had never failed him. From his
entrance into Illinois politics in 1834, he had been the recipient of
every political honor his party had to bestow. For the past eleven
years he had been a member of the United States Senate, where he had
influenced all the important legislation of the day and met in debate
every strong speaker of North and South. In 1852, and again in 1856,
he had been a strongly supported, though unsuccessful candidate for
the Democratic Presidential nomination. In 1858 he was put at or near
the head of every list of possible Presidential candidates made up for
1860.
How barren Lincoln's public career in comparison! Three terms in the
lower house of the State Assembly, one term in Congress, then a
failure which drove him from public life. Now he returns as a bolter
from his party, a leader in a new organization which the conservatives
are denouncing as "visionary," "impractical," "revolutionary."
No one recognized more clearly than Lincoln the difference between
himself and his opponent. "With me," he said, sadly, in comparing the
careers of himself and Douglas, "the race of ambition has been a
failure--a flat failure. With him it has been one of splendid
success." He warned his party at the outset that, with himself as a
standard-bearer, the battle must be fought on principle alone, without
any of the external aids which Douglas's brilliant career gave.
"Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown," he said; "All the anxious
politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years
past, have been looking upon him as certain, at no distant day, to be
the President of the United States. They have seen in his round,
jolly, fruitful face, post-offices, land-offices, marshal-ships, and
cabinet appointments, chargéships and foreign missions, bursting and
sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by
their greedy hands. And as they have been gazing upon this attractive
picture so long, they cannot, in the little distraction that has taken
place in the party, bring themselves to give up the charming hope; but
with greedier anxiety they rush about him, sustain him, and give him
marches, triumphal entries, and receptions beyond what even in the
days of his highest prosperity they could have brought about in his
favor. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President.
In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages
were sprouting out. These are disadvantages, all taken together, that
the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon
principle, and upon principle alone."
If one will take a map of Illinois and locate the points of the
Lincoln and Douglas debates held between August 21 and October 15,
1858, he will see that the whole State was traversed in the contest.
The first took place at Ottawa, about seventy-five miles southwest of
Chicago, on August 21; the second at Freeport, near the Wisconsin
boundary, on August 27. The third was in the extreme southern part of
the State, at Jonesboro, on September 15. Three days later the
contestants met one hundred and fifty miles northeast of Jonesboro, at
Charleston. The fifth, sixth, and seventh debates were held in the
western part of the State; at Galesburg, October 7; Quincy, October
13; and Alton, October 15.
Constant exposure and fatigue were unavoidable in meeting these
engagements. Both contestants spoke almost every day through the
intervals between the joint debates; and as railroad communication in
Illinois in 1858 was still very incomplete, they were often obliged to
resort to horse, carriage, or steamer, to reach the desired points.
Judge Douglas succeeded, however, in making this difficult journey
something of a triumphal procession. He was accompanied throughout the
campaign by his wife--a beautiful and brilliant woman--and by a
number of distinguished Democrats.
On the Illinois Central Railroad he had always a special car,
sometimes a special train. Frequently he swept by Lincoln,
side-tracked in an accommodation or freight train. "The gentleman in
that car evidently smelt no royalty on our carriage," laughed Lincoln
one day, as he watched from the caboose of a laid-up freight train the
decorated special of Douglas flying by.
It was only when Lincoln left the railroad and crossed the prairie at
some isolated town, that he went in state. The attentions he received
were often very trying to him. He detested what he called "fizzlegigs
and fireworks," and would squirm in disgust when his friends gave him
a genuine prairie ovation. Usually, when he was going to a point
distant from the railway, a "distinguished citizen" met him at the
station nearest the place with a carriage. When they were come within
two or three miles of the town, a long procession with banners and
band would appear winding across the prairie to meet the speaker. A
speech of greeting was made, and then the ladies of the entertainment
committee would present Lincoln with flowers, sometimes even winding a
garland about his head and lanky figure. His embarrassment at these
attentions was thoroughly appreciated by his friends. At the Ottawa
debate the enthusiasm of his supporters was so great that they
insisted on carrying him from the platform to the house where he was
to be entertained. Powerless to escape from the clutches of his
admirers, he could only cry, "Don't, boys; let me down; come now,
don't." But the "boys" persisted, and they tell to-day proudly of
their exploit and of the cordial hand-shake Lincoln, all embarrassed
as he was, gave each when at last he was free.
On arrival at the towns where the joint debates were held, Douglas was
always met by a brass band and a salute of thirty-two guns (the Union
was composed of thirty-two States in 1858), and was escorted to the
hotel in the finest equipage to be had. Lincoln's supporters took
delight in showing their contempt of Douglas's elegance by affecting a
Republican simplicity, often carrying their candidate through the
streets on a high and unadorned hay-rack drawn by farm horses. The
scenes in the towns on the occasion of the debates were perhaps never
equalled at any other of the hustings of this country. No distance
seemed too great for the people to go; no vehicle too slow or
fatiguing. At Charleston there was a great delegation of men, women
and children present which had come in a long procession from Indiana
by farm wagons, afoot, on horseback, and in carriages. The crowds at
three or four of the debates were for that day immense. There were
estimated to be from eight thousand to fourteen thousand people at
Quincy, some six thousand at Alton, from ten thousand to fifteen
thousand at Charleston, some twenty thousand at Ottawa. Many of those
at Ottawa came the night before. "It was a matter of but a short
time," says Mr. George Beatty of Ottawa, "until the few hotels, the
livery stables, and private houses were crowded, and there were no
accommodations left. Then the campaigners spread out about the town,
and camped in whatever spot was most convenient. They went along the
bluff and on the bottom-lands, and that night, the camp-fires, spread
up and down the valley for a mile, made it look as if an army was
gathered about us."
When the crowd was massed at the place of the debate, the scene was
one of the greatest hubbub and confusion. On the corners of the
squares, and scattered around the outskirts of the crowd, were fakirs
of every description, selling painkillers and ague cures, watermelons
and lemonade; jugglers and beggars plied their trades, and the brass
bands of all the four corners within twenty-five miles tooted and
pounded at "Hail Columbia, Happy Land," or "Columbia, the Gem of the
Ocean."
Conspicuous in the processions at all the points was what Lincoln
called the "Basket of Flowers," thirty-two young girls in a
resplendent car, representing the Union. At Charleston, a thirty-third
young woman rode behind the car, representing Kansas. She carried a
banner inscribed: "I will be free"; a motto which brought out from
nearly all the newspaper reporters the comment that she was too fair
to be long free.
The mottoes at the different meetings epitomized the popular
conception of the issues and the candidates. Among the Lincoln
sentiments were:
Illinois born under the Ordinance of '87.
Free Territories and Free Men,
Free Pulpits and Free Preachers,
Free Press and a Free Pen,
Free Schools and Free Teachers.
"Westward the star of empire takes its way;
The girls link on to Lincoln, their mothers were for Clay."
Abe the Giant-Killer.
Edgar County for the Tall Sucker.
A striking feature of the crowds was the number of women they
included. The intelligent and lively interest they took in the debates
caused much comment. No doubt Mrs. Douglas's presence had something to
do with this. They were particularly active in receiving the speakers,
and at Quincy, Lincoln, on being presented with what the local press
described as a "beautiful and elegant bouquet," took pains to express
his gratification at the part women everywhere took in the contest.
While this helter-skelter outpouring of prairiedom had the appearance
of being little more than a great jollification, a lawless country
fair, in reality it was with the majority of the people a profoundly
serious matter. With every discussion it became more vital. Indeed, in
the first debate, which was opened and closed by Douglas, the relation
of the two speakers became dramatic. It was here that Douglas hoping
to fasten on Lincoln the stigma of "abolitionist," charged him with
having undertaken to abolitionize the old Whig party, and having been
in 1854 a subscriber to a radical platform proclaimed at Springfield.
This platform Douglas read. Lincoln, when he replied, could only say
he was never at the convention--knew nothing of the resolutions; but
the impression prevailed that he was cornered. The next issue of the
Chicago "Press and Tribune" dispelled it. That paper had employed to
report the debates the first shorthand reporter of Chicago, Mr. Robert
L. Hitt--now a Member of Congress and the Chairman of the Committee on
Foreign Affairs. Mr. Hitt, when Douglas began to read the resolutions,
took an opportunity to rest, supposing he could get the original from
the speaker. He took down only the first line of each resolution. He
missed Douglas after the debate, but on reaching Chicago, where he
wrote out his report, he sent an assistant to the files to find the
platform adopted at the Springfield Convention. It was brought, but
when Mr. Hitt began to transcribe it he saw at once that it was widely
different from the one Douglas had read. There was great excitement in
the office, and the staff, ardently Republican, went to work to
discover where the resolutions had come from. It was found that they
originated at a meeting of radical abolitionists with whom Lincoln had
never been associated.
The "Press and Tribune" announced the "forgery," as it was called in a
caustic editorial, "The Little Dodger Cornered and Caught." Within a
week even the remote school-districts of Illinois were discussing
Douglas's action, and many of the most important papers of the nation
had made it a subject of editorial comment.
Almost without exception Douglas was condemned. No amount of
explanation on his part helped him. "The particularity of Douglas's
charge," said the Louisville "Journal," "precludes the idea that he
was simply and innocently mistaken." Lovers of fair play were
disgusted, and those of Douglas's own party who would have applauded a
trick too clever to be discovered could not forgive him for one which
had been found out. Greeley came out bitterly against him, and before
long wrote to Lincoln and Herndon that Douglas was "like the man's boy
who (he said) didn't weigh so much as he expected and he always knew
he wouldn't."
Douglas's error became a sharp-edged sword in Lincoln's hand. Without
directly referring to it, he called his hearers' attention to the
forgery every time he quoted a document by his elaborate explanation
that he believed, unless there was some mistake on the part of those
with whom the matter originated and which he had been unable to
detect, that this was correct. Once when Douglas brought forward a
document, Lincoln blandly remarked that he could scarcely be blamed
for doubting its genuineness since the introduction of the Springfield
resolutions at Ottawa.
It was in the second debate, at Freeport, that Lincoln made the
boldest stroke of the contest. Soon after the Ottawa debate, in
discussing his plan for the next encounter, with a number of his
political friends,--Washburne, Cook, Judd, and others,--he told them
he proposed to ask Douglas four questions, which he read. One and all
cried halt at the second question. Under no condition, they said, must
he put it. If it were put, Douglas would answer it in such a way as to
win the senatorship. The morning of the debate, while on the way to
Freeport, Lincoln read the same questions to Mr. Joseph Medill. "I do
not like this second question, Mr. Lincoln," said Mr. Medill. The two
men argued to their journey's end, but Lincoln was still unconvinced.
Even after he reached Freeport several Republican leaders came to him
pleading, "Do not ask that question." He was obdurate; and he went on
the platform with a higher head, a haughtier step than his friends had
noted in him before. Lincoln was going to ruin himself, the committee
said despondently; one would think he did not want the senatorship.
The mooted question ran in Lincoln's notes: "Can the people of a
United States territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any
citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to
the formation of a State Constitution?" Lincoln had seen the
irreconcilableness of Douglas's own measure of popular sovereignty,
which declared that the people of a territory should be left to
regulate their domestic concerns in their own way subject only to the
Constitution, and the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott
case that slaves, being property, could not under the Constitution be
excluded from a territory. He knew that if Douglas said no to this
question, his Illinois constituents would never return him to the
Senate. He believed that if he said yes, the people of the South would
never vote for him for President of the United States. He was willing
himself to lose the senatorship in order to defeat Douglas for the
Presidency in 1860. "I am after larger game; the battle of 1860 is
worth a hundred of this," he said confidently.
The question was put, and Douglas answered it with rare artfulness.
"It matters not," he cried, "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter
decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go
into a territory under the Constitution; the people have the lawful
means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason
that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is
supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can
only be established by the local legislature, and if the people are
opposed to slavery, they will elect representatives to that body who
will, by unfriendly legislation, effectually prevent the introduction
of it into their midst. If, on the contrary, they are for it, their
legislature will favor its extension."
His democratic constituents went wild over the clever way in which
Douglas had escaped Lincoln's trap. He now practically had his
election. The Republicans shook their heads. Lincoln only was serene.
He alone knew what he had done. The Freeport debate had no sooner
reached the pro-slavery press than a storm of protest went up.
Douglas had betrayed the South. He had repudiated the Supreme Court
decision. He had declared that slavery could be kept out of the
territories by other legislation than a State Constitution. "The
Freeport doctrine," or "the theory of unfriendly legislation," as it
became known, spread month by month, and slowly but surely made
Douglas an impossible candidate in the South. The force of the
question was not realized in full by Lincoln's friends until the
Democratic party met in Charleston, S. C., in 1860, and the Southern
delegates refused to support Douglas because of the answer he gave to
Lincoln's question in the Freeport debate of 1858.
"Do you recollect the argument we had on the way up to Freeport two
years ago over the question I was going to ask Judge Douglas?" Lincoln
asked Mr. Joseph Medill, when the latter went to Springfield a few
days after the election of 1860.
"Yes," said Medill, "I recollect it very well."
"Don't you think I was right now?"
"We were both right. The question hurt Douglas for the Presidency, but
it lost you the senatorship."
"Yes, and I have won the place he was playing for."
From the beginning of the campaign Lincoln supplemented the strength
of his arguments by inexhaustible good humor. Douglas, physically
worn, harassed by the trend which Lincoln had given the discussions,
irritated that his adroitness and eloquence could not so cover the
fundamental truth of the Republican position but that it would up
again, often grew angry, even abusive. Lincoln answered him with most
effective raillery. At Havana, where he spoke the day after Douglas,
he said:
"I am informed that my distinguished friend yesterday became a little
excited--nervous, perhaps--and he said something about fighting, as
though referring to a pugilistic encounter between him and myself. Did
anybody in this audience hear him use such language? (Cries of "Yes.")
I am informed further, that somebody in his audience, rather more
excited and nervous than himself, took off his coat, and offered to
take the job off Judge Douglas's hands, and fight Lincoln himself. Did
anybody here witness that war-like proceeding? (Laughter and cries of
"Yes.") Well, I merely desire to say that I shall fight neither Judge
Douglas nor his second. I shall not do this for two reasons, which I
will now explain. In the first place, a fight would prove nothing
which is in issue in this contest. It might establish that Judge
Douglas is a more muscular man than myself, or it might demonstrate
that I am a more muscular man than Judge Douglas. But this question is
not referred to in the Cincinnati platform, nor in either of the
Springfield platforms. Neither result would prove him right nor me
wrong; and so of the gentleman who volunteered to do this fighting for
him. If my fighting Judge Douglas would not prove anything, it would
certainly prove nothing for me to fight his bottle-holder.
"My second reason for not having a personal encounter with the judge
is, that I don't believe he wants it himself. He and I are about the
best friends in the world, and when we get together he would no more
think of fighting me than of fighting his wife. Therefore, ladies and
gentlemen, when the judge talked about fighting, he was not giving
vent to any ill feeling of his own, but merely trying to excite--well,
enthusiasm against me on the part of his audience. And as I find he
was tolerably successful, we will call it quits."
More difficult for Lincoln to take good-naturedly than threats and
hard names was the irrelevant matters which Douglas dragged into the
debates to turn attention from the vital arguments. Thus Douglas
insisted repeatedly on taunting Lincoln because his zealous friends
had carried him off the platform at Ottawa. "Lincoln was so frightened
by the questions put to him," said Douglas, "that he could not walk."
He tried to arouse the prejudice of the audience by absurd charges of
abolitionism. Lincoln wanted to give negroes social equality; he
wanted a negro wife; he was willing to allow Fred Douglass to make
speeches for him. Again he took up a good deal of Lincoln's time by
forcing him to answer to a charge of refusing to vote supplies for the
soldiers in the Mexican War. Lincoln denied and explained, until at
last, at Charleston, he turned suddenly to Douglas's supporters,
dragging one of the strongest of them--the Hon. O. B. Ficklin, with
whom he had been in Congress in 1848--to the platform.
"I do not mean to do anything with Mr. Ficklin," he said, "except to
present his face and tell you that he personally knows it to be a
lie." And Mr. Ficklin had to acknowledge that Lincoln was right.
"Judge Douglas," said Lincoln in speaking of this policy, "is playing
cuttlefish--a small species of fish that has no mode of defending
himself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid which makes
the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes."
The question at stake was too serious in Lincoln's judgment, for
platform jugglery. Every moment of his time which Douglas forced him
to spend answering irrelevant charges he gave begrudgingly. He
struggled constantly to keep his speeches on the line of solid
argument. Slowly but surely those who followed the debates began to
understand this. It was Douglas who drew the great masses to the
debates in the first place; it was because of him that the public men
and the newspapers of the East, as well as of the West, watched the
discussions. But as the days went on it was not Douglas who made the
impression.
During the hours of the speeches the two men seemed well mated. "I can
recall only one fact of the debates," says Mrs. William Crotty, of
Seneca, Illinois, "that I felt so sorry for Lincoln when Douglas was
speaking, and then to my surprise I felt so sorry for Douglas when
Lincoln replied." The disinterested to whom it was an intellectual
game, felt the power and charm of both men. Partisans had each reason
enough to cheer. It was afterwards, as the debates were talked over by
auditors as they lingered at the country store or were grouped on the
fence in the evening, or when they were read in the generous reports
which the newspapers of Illinois and even of other States gave, that
the thoroughness of Lincoln's argument was understood. Even the first
debate at Ottawa had a surprising effect. "I tell you," says Mr.
George Beatty of Ottawa, "that debate set people thinking on these
important questions in a way they hadn't dreamed of. I heard any
number of men say: 'This thing is an awfully serious question, and I
have about concluded Lincoln has got it right.' My father, a
thoughtful, God-fearing man, said to me, as we went home to supper,
'George, you are young, and don't see what this thing means, as I do.
Douglas's speeches of "squatter sovereignty" please you younger men,
but I tell you that with us older men it's a great question that faces
us. We've either got to keep slavery back or it's going to spread all
over the country. That's the real question that's behind all this.
Lincoln is right.' And that was the feeling that prevailed, I think,
among the majority, after the debate was over. People went home
talking about the danger of slavery getting a hold in the North. This
territory had been Democratic; La Salle County, the morning of the day
of the debate, was Democratic; but when the next day came around,
hundreds of Democrats had been made Republicans, owing to the light in
which Lincoln had brought forward the fact that slavery threatened."
It was among Lincoln's own friends, however, that his speeches
produced the deepest impression. They had believed him to be strong,
but probably there was no one of them who had not felt dubious about
his ability to meet Douglas. Many even feared a fiasco. Gradually it
began to be clear to them that Lincoln was the stronger. Could it be
that Lincoln really was a great man? The young Republican journalists
of the "Press and Tribune"--Scripps, Hitt, Medill--began to ask
themselves the question. One evening as they talked over Lincoln's
argument a letter was received. It came from a prominent Eastern
statesman. "Who is this man that is replying to Douglas in your
State?" he asked. "Do you realize that no greater speeches have been
made on public questions in the history of our country; that his
knowledge of the subject is profound, his logical unanswerable, his
style inimitable?" Similar letters kept coming from various parts of
the country. Before the campaign was over Lincoln's friends were
exultant. Their favorite was a great man, "a full-grown man," as one
of them wrote in his paper.
The country at large watched Lincoln with astonishment. When the
debates began there were Republicans in Illinois of wider national
reputation. Judge Lyman Trumbull, then Senator; was better known. He
was an able debater, and a speech which he made in August against
Douglas's record called from the New York "Evening Post" the remark:
"This is the heaviest blow struck at Senator Douglas since he took the
field in Illinois; it is unanswerable, and we suspect that it will be
fatal." Trumbull's speech the "Post" afterwards published in pamphlet
form. Besides Trumbull, Owen Lovejoy, Oglesby, and Palmer were all
speaking. That Lincoln should not only have so far outstripped men of
his own party, but should have out-argued Douglas, was the cause of
comment everywhere. "No man of this generation," said the "Evening
Post" editorially, at the close of the debate, "has grown more rapidly
before the country than Lincoln in this canvass." As a matter of fact,
Lincoln had attracted the attention of all the thinking men of the
country. "The first thing that really awakened my interest in him,"
says Henry Ward Beecher, "was his speech parallel with Douglas in
Illinois, and indeed it was that manifestation of ability that secured
his nomination to the Presidency."
But able as were Lincoln's arguments, deep as was the impression he
had made, he was not elected to the senatorship. Douglas won fairly
enough; though it is well to note that if the Republicans did not
elect a senator they gained a substantial number of votes over those
polled in 1856.
Lincoln accepted the result with a serenity inexplicable to his
supporters. To him the contest was but one battle in a "durable"
struggle. Little matter who won now, if in the end the right
triumphed. From the first he had looked at the final result--not at
the senatorship. "I do not claim, gentlemen, to be unselfish," he said
at Chicago in July. "I do not pretend that I would not like to go to
the United States Senate; I make no such hypocritical pretense; but I
do say to you that in this mighty issue, it is nothing to you, nothing
to the mass of the people of the nation, whether or not Judge Douglas
or myself shall ever be heard of after this night; it may be a trifle
to either of us, but in connection with this mighty question, upon
which hang the destinies of the nation perhaps, it is absolutely
nothing."
The intense heat and fury of the debates, the defeat in November, did
not alter a jot this high view. "I am glad I made the late race," he
wrote Dr. A. H. Henry. "It gave me a hearing on the great and durable
question of the age which I would have had in no other way; and though
I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made
some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I
am gone."
At that date perhaps no one appreciated the value of what Lincoln had
done as well as he did himself. He was absolutely sure he was right
and that in the end people would see it. Though he might not rise, he
knew his cause would.
"Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as
the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest," he
wrote. "No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony
long. Another explosion will soon occur." His whole attention was
given to conserving what the Republicans had gained--"We have some one
hundred and twenty thousand clear Republican votes. That pile is worth
keeping together;" to consoling his friends--"You are feeling badly,"
he wrote to N. B. Judd, Chairman of the Republican Committee, "and
this too shall pass away, never fear"; to rallying for another
effort,--"The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the
end of one or even one hundred defeats."
If Lincoln had at times a fear that his defeat would cause him to be
set aside, it soon was dispelled. The interest awakened in him was
genuine, and it spread with the wider reading and discussion of his
arguments. He was besieged by letters from all parts of the Union,
congratulations, encouragements, criticisms. Invitations for lectures
poured in upon him, and he became the first choice of his entire party
for political speeches.
The greater number of these invitations he declined. He had given so
much time to politics since 1854 that his law practice had been
neglected and he was feeling poor; but there were certain of the calls
which could not be resisted. Douglas spoke several times for the
Democrats of Ohio in the 1859 campaign for governor and Lincoln
naturally was asked to reply. He made but two speeches, one at
Columbus on September 16 and the other at Cincinnati on September 17,
but he had great audiences on both occasions. The Columbus speech was
devoted almost entirely to answering an essay by Douglas which had
been published in the September number of "Harper's Magazine," and
which began by asserting that--"Under our complex system of government
it is the first duty of American statesmen to mark distinctly the
dividing-line between Federal and Local authority." It was an
elaborate argument for "popular sovereignty" and attracted national
attention. Indeed, at the moment it was the talk of the country.
Lincoln literally tore it to bits.
"What is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty?" he asked. "It is, as a
principle, no other than that if one man chooses to make a slave of
another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to
object. Applied in government, as he seeks to apply it, it is this:
If, in a new territory into which a few people are beginning to enter
for the purpose of making their homes, they choose to either exclude
from their limits or to establish it there, however one or the other
may affect the persons to be enslaved, or the infinitely greater
number of persons who are afterward to inhabit that territory, or the
other members of the families, or communities, of which they are but
an incipient member, or the general head of the family of States as
parent of all--however their action may affect one or the other of
these, there is no power or right to interfere. That is Douglas's
popular sovereignty applied."
It was in this address that Lincoln uttered the oft-quoted paragraphs:
"I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He
is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a
lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him. That is the build of
the man, and consequently he looks upon the matter of slavery in this
unimportant light.
"Judge Douglas ought to remember, when he is endeavoring to force this
policy upon the American people, that while he is put up in that way,
a good many are not. He ought to remember that there was once in this
country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a
Democrat--a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent
amongst Democrats to-day, it is true; but that man did not exactly
take this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which
our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all
know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember
that God is just!' We know how he looked upon it when he thus
expressed himself. There was danger to this country, danger of the
avenging justice of God, in that little unimportant popular
sovereignty question of Judge Douglas. He supposed there was a
question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any
race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of
Jehovah--that when a nation thus dared the Almighty, every friend of
that nation had cause to dread his wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson
and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us."
One interesting point about the Columbus address is that in it appears
the germ of the Cooper Institute speech delivered five months later in
New York City.
Lincoln made so deep an impression in Ohio by his speeches that the
State Republican Committee asked permission to publish them together
with the Lincoln-Douglas Debates as campaign documents in the
Presidential election of the next year.
In December he yielded to the persuasion of his Kansas political
friends and delivered five lectures in that State, only fragments of
which have been preserved.
Unquestionably the most effective piece of work he did that winter was
the address at Cooper Institute, New York, on February 27. He had
received an invitation in the fall of 1859 to lecture at Plymouth
Church, Brooklyn. To his friends it was evident that he was greatly
pleased by the compliment, but that he feared that he was not equal to
an Eastern audience. After some hesitation he accepted, provided they
would take a political speech if he could find time to get up no
other. When he reached New York he found that he was to speak there
instead of Brooklyn, and that he was certain to have a distinguished
audience. Fearful lest he was not as well prepared as he ought to be,
conscious, too, no doubt, that he had a great opportunity before him,
he spent nearly all of the two days and a half before his lecture in
revising his matter and in familiarizing himself with it. In order
that he might be sure that he was heard he arranged with his friend,
Mason Brayman, who had come on to New York with him, to sit in the
back of the hall and in case he did not speak loud enough to raise his
high hat on a cane.
Mr. Lincoln's audience was a notable one even for New York. It
included William Cullen Bryant, who introduced him; Horace Greeley,
David Dudley Field, and many more well known men of the day. It is
doubtful if there were any persons present, even his best friends, who
expected that Lincoln would do more than interest his hearers by his
sound arguments. Many have confessed since that they feared his queer
manner and quaint speeches would amuse people so much that they would
fail to catch the weight of his logic. But to the surprise of
everybody Lincoln impressed his audience from the start by his dignity
and his seriousness. "His manner was, to a New York audience, a very
strange one, but it was captivating," wrote an auditor. "He held the
vast meeting spellbound, and as one by one his oddly expressed but
trenchant and convincing arguments confirmed the soundness of his
political conclusions, the house broke out in wild and prolonged
enthusiasm. I think I never saw an audience more thoroughly carried
away by an orator."
The Cooper Union speech was founded on a sentence from one of
Douglas's Ohio speeches:--"Our fathers when they framed the government
under which we live understood this question just as well, and even
better, than we do now." Douglas claimed that the "fathers" held that
the Constitution forbade the Federal government controlling slavery
in the Territories. Lincoln with infinite care had investigated the
opinions and votes of each of the "fathers"--whom he took to be the
thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution--and showed conclusively
that a majority of them "certainly understood that no proper division
of local from Federal authority nor any part of the Constitution
forbade the Federal government to control slavery in the Federal
Territories." Not only did he show this of the thirty-nine framers of
the original Constitution, but he defied anybody to show that one of
the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments to
the Constitution ever held any such view.
"Let us," he said, "who believe that 'our fathers who framed the
government under which we live understood this question just as well,
and even better, than we do now,' speak as they spoke, and act as they
acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask--all Republicans desire--in
relation to slavery. As those fathers marked it, so let it be again
marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and
protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us
makes that toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the
guaranties those fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and
fairly, maintained. For this Republicans contend, and with this, so
far as I know or believe, they will be content."
One after another he took up and replied to the charges the South was
making against the North at the moment:--Sectionalism, radicalism,
giving undue prominence to the slave question, stirring up
insurrection among slaves, refusing to allow constitutional rights,
and to each he had an unimpassioned answer inpregnable with facts.
The discourse was ended with what Lincoln felt to be a precise
statement of the opinion of the question on both sides, and of the
duty of the Republican party under the circumstances. This portion of
his address is one of the finest early examples of that simple and
convincing style in which most of his later public documents were
written.
"If slavery is right," he said, "all words, acts, laws, and
constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced
and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its
nationality--its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly
insist upon its extension--its enlargement. All they ask we could
readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as
readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and
our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole
controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for
desiring its full recognition as being right; but thinking it wrong,
as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their
views, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and
political responsibilities, can we do this?
"Wrong, as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone
where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from
its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will
prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to
overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids
this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us
be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are
so industriously plied and belabored--contrivances such as groping for
some middle ground between right and wrong: vain as the search for a
man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a
policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care;
such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to
Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners,
but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington,
imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington
did.
"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations
against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the
government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty
as we understand it."
From New York Lincoln went to New Hampshire to visit his son Robert,
then at Phillips Exeter Academy. His coming was known only a short
time before he arrived and hurried arrangements were made for him to
speak at Concord, Manchester, Exeter and Dover. At Concord the address
was made in the afternoon on only a few hours' notice; nevertheless,
he had a great audience, so eager were men at the time to hear
anybody who had serious arguments on the slavery question. Something
of the impression Lincoln made in New Hampshire may be gathered from
the following article, "Mr. Lincoln in New Hampshire," which appeared
in the Boston "Atlas and Bee" for March 5:
The Concord "Statesman" says that notwithstanding the rain of
Thursday, rendering travelling very inconvenient, the largest hall in
that city was crowded to hear Mr. Lincoln. The editor says it was one
of the most powerful, logical and compacted speeches to which it was
ever our fortune to listen; an argument against the system of slavery,
and in defence of the position of the Republican party, from the
deductions of which no reasonable man could possibly escape. He
fortified every position assumed, by proofs which it is impossible to
gainsay; and while his speech was at intervals enlivened by remarks
which elicited applause at the expense of the Democratic party, there
was, nevertheless, not a single word which tended to impair the
dignity of the speaker, or weaken the force of the great truths he
uttered.
The "Statesman" adds that the address "was perfect and was closed by a
peroration which brought his audience to their feet. We are not
extravagant in the remark, that a political speech of greater power
has rarely if ever been uttered in the Capital of New Hampshire. At
its conclusion nine roof-raising cheers were given; three for the
speaker, three for the Republicans of Illinois, and three for the
Republicans of New Hampshire."
On the same evening Mr. Lincoln spoke at Manchester, to an immense
gathering in Smyth's Hall. The "Mirror," a neutral paper, gives the
following enthusiastic notice of his speech: "The audience was a
flattering one to the reputation of the speaker. It was composed of
persons of all sorts of political notions, earnest to hear one whose
fame was so great, and we think most of them went away thinking better
of him than they anticipated they should. He spoke an hour and a half
with great fairness, great apparent candor, and with wonderful
interest. He did not abuse the South, the Administration, or the
Democrats, or indulge in any personalities, with the solitary
exception of a few hits at Douglas's notions. He is far from
prepossessing in personal appearance, and his voice is disagreeable,
and yet he wins your attention and good will from the start.
"He indulges in no flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages; he is
not a wit, a humorist or a clown; yet, so great a vein of pleasantry
and good nature pervades what he says, gliding over a deep current of
practical argument, he keeps his hearers in a smiling good mood with
their mouths open ready to swallow all he says. His sense of the
ludicrous is very keen, and an exhibition of that is the clincher of
all his arguments; not the ludicrous acts of persons, but ludicrous
ideas. Hence he is never offensive, and steals away willingly into
his train of belief, persons who are opposed to him. For the first
half hour his opponents would agree with every word he uttered, and
from that point he began to lead them off, little by little,
cunningly, till it seemed as if he had got them all into his fold. He
displays more shrewdness, more knowledge of the masses of mankind than
any public speaker we have heard since long Jim Wilson left for
California."
From New Hampshire Lincoln went to Connecticut, where on March 5 he
spoke at Hartford, on March 6 at New Haven, on March 8 at Woonsocket,
on March 9 at Norwich. There are no reports of the New Hampshire
speeches, but two of the Connecticut speeches were published in part
and one in full. Their effect was very similar, according to the
newspapers of the day, to that in New Hampshire, described by the
"Atlas and Bee."
By his debates with Douglas and the speeches in Ohio, Kansas, New York
and New England, Lincoln had become a national figure in the minds of
all the political leaders of the country, and of the thinking men of
the North. Never in the history of the United States had a man become
prominent in a more logical and intelligent way. At the beginning of
the struggle against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854,
Abraham Lincoln was scarcely known outside of his own State. Even most
of the men whom he had met in his brief term in Congress had forgotten
him. Yet in four years he had become one of the central figures of
his party; and now, by worsting the greatest orator and politician of
his time, he had drawn the eyes of the nation to him.
It had been a long road he had travelled to make himself a national
figure. Twenty-eight years before he had deliberately entered
politics. He had been beaten, but had persisted; he had succeeded and
failed; he had abandoned the struggle and returned to his profession.
His outraged sense of justice had driven him back, and for six years
he had travelled up and down Illinois trying to prove to men that
slavery extension was wrong. It was by no one speech, by no one
argument that he had wrought. Every day his ceaseless study and
pondering gave him new matter, and every speech he made was fresh. He
could not repeat an old speech, he said, because the subject enlarged
and widened so in his mind as he went on that it was "easier to make a
new one than an old one." He had never yielded in his campaign to
tricks of oratory--never played on emotions. He had been so strong in
his convictions of the right of his case that his speeches had been
arguments pure and simple. Their elegance was that of a demonstration
in Euclid. They persuaded because they proved. He had never for a
moment counted personal ambition before the cause. To insure an ardent
opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in the United States Senate, he
had at one time given up his chance for the senatorship. To show the
fallacy of Douglas's argument, he had asked a question which his party
pleaded with him to pass by, assuring him that it would lose him the
election. In every step of this six years he had been disinterested,
calm, unyielding, and courageous. He knew he was right, and could
afford to wait. "The result is not doubtful," he told his friends. "We
shall not fail--if we stand firm. We shall not fail. Wise counsels may
accelerate or mistakes delay it; but, sooner or later, the victory is
sure to come."
The country, amazed at the rare moral and intellectual character of
Lincoln, began to ask questions about him, and then his history came
out; a pioneer home, little schooling, few books, hard labor at all
the many trades of the frontiersman, a profession mastered o' nights
by the light of a friendly cooper's fire, an early entry into politics
and law--and then twenty-five years of incessant poverty and struggle.
The homely story gave a touch of mystery to the figure which loomed so
large. Men felt a sudden reverence for a mind and heart developed to
these noble proportions in so unfriendly a habitat. They turned
instinctively to one so familiar with strife for help in solving the
desperate problem with which the nation had grappled. And thus it was
that, at fifty years of age, Lincoln became a national figure.
[4] _By special permission of the McClure Company._
[A] _Stephen_ A. Douglas, _Franklin_ Pierce, _Roger_ Taney, _James_
Buchanan.