of the Republicans in the bearing of their political adversaries. A great
deal of their war with us nowadays is mere bushwhacking. At the battle
of Waterloo, when Napoleon's cavalry had charged again and again upon
the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up
the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere
vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares.
The Democrats are in that sort of extreme desperation; it is nothing else.
I will take up a few of these arguments.
There is "the irrepressible conflict." How they rail at Seward for that
saying! They repeat it constantly; and, although the proof has been thrust
under their noses again and again that almost every good man since the
formation of our Government has uttered that same sentiment, from General
Washington, who "trusted that we should yet have a confederacy of free
States," with Jefferson, Jay, Monroe, down to the latest days, yet they
refuse to notice that at all, and persist in railing at Seward for saying
it. Even Roger A. Pryor, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, uttered the same
sentiment in almost the same language, and yet so little offence did
it give the Democrats that he was sent for to Washington to edit the
States--the Douglas organ there--while Douglas goes into hydrophobia and
spasms of rage because Seward dared to repeat it. This is what I call
bushwhacking, a sort of argument that they must know any child can see
through.
Another is John Brown: "You stir up insurrections, you invade the South;
John Brown! Harper's Ferry!" Why, John Brown was not a Republican!
You have never implicated a single Republican in that Harper's Ferry
enterprise. We tell you that if any member of the Republican party is
guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know
it, you are inexcusable not to designate the man and prove the fact. If
you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially
to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the
proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does
not know to be true is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no
Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair, but
still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such
results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrines, and make
no declarations, which were not held to and made by our fathers who framed
the Government 'under which we live, and we cannot see how declarations
that were patriotic when they made them are villainous when we make them.
You never dealt fairly by us in relation to that affair--and I will say
frankly that I know of nothing in your character that should lead us to
suppose that you would. You had just been soundly thrashed in elections
in several States, and others were soon to come. You rejoiced at the
occasion, and only were troubled that there were not three times as many
killed in the affair. You were in evident glee; there was no sorrow for
the killed nor for the peace of Virginia disturbed; you were rejoicing
that by charging Republicans with this thing you might get an advantage of
us in New York, and the other States. You pulled that string as tightly as
you could, but your very generous and worthy expectations were not quite
fulfilled. Each Republican knew that the charge was a slander as to
himself at least, and was not inclined by it to cast his vote in your
favor. It was mere bushwhacking, because you had nothing else to do. You
are still on that track, and I say, go on! If you think you can slander
a woman into loving you or a man into voting for you, try it till you are
satisfied!
Another specimen of this bushwhacking, that "shoe strike." Now be it
understood that I do not pretend to know all about the matter. I am merely
going to speculate a little about some of its phases. And at the outset, I
am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which
laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to
work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor
whether you pay them or not! I like the system which lets a man quit when
he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. One of the reasons why
I am opposed to slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the
laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to
acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe
in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than
good. So, while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to
allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.
When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such
that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed
condition of labor for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that
twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a
flatboat--just what might happen to any poor man's son! I want every man
to have a chance--and I believe a Black man is entitled to it--in which he
can better his condition; when he may look forward and hope to be a hired
laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to
hire men to work for him! That is the system. Up here in New England, you
have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you
find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is
not another such place on earth! I desire that if you get too thick here,
and find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have a
chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded, nor
have your families corrupted, by forced rivalry with negro slaves. I want
you to have a clean bed and no snakes in it! Then you can better your
condition, and so it may go on and on in one endless round so long as man
exists on the face of the earth!
Now, to come back to this shoe strike,--if, as the senator from Illinois
asserts, this is caused by withdrawal of Southern votes, consider
briefly how you will meet the difficulty. You have done nothing, and have
protested that you have done nothing, to injure the South. And yet, to get
back the shoe trade, you must leave off doing something which you are
now doing. What is it? You must stop thinking slavery wrong! Let your
institutions be wholly changed; let your State constitutions be subverted;
glorify slavery, and so you will get back the shoe trade--for what? You
have brought owned labor with it, to compete with your own labor, to
underwork you, and to degrade you! Are you ready to get back the trade on
those terms?
But the statement is not correct. You have not lost that trade; orders
were never better than now! Senator Mason, a Democrat, comes into the
Senate in homespun, a proof that the dissolution of the Union has actually
begun! but orders are the same. Your factories have not struck work,
neither those where they make anything for coats, nor for pants nor
for shirts, nor for ladies' dresses. Mr. Mason has not reached the
manufacturers who ought to have made him a coat and pants! To make his
proof good for anything he should have come into the Senate barefoot!
Another bushwhacking contrivance; simply that, nothing else! I find a good
many people who are very much concerned about the loss of Southern trade.
Now either these people are sincere or they are not. I will speculate a
little about that. If they are sincere, and are moved by any real danger
of the loss of Southern trade, they will simply get their names on the
white list, and then, instead of persuading Republicans to do likewise,
they will be glad to keep you away! Don't you see that they cut off
competition? They would not be whispering around to Republicans to come
in and share the profits with them. But if they are not sincere, and are
merely trying to fool Republicans out of their votes, they will grow very
anxious about your pecuniary prospects; they are afraid you are going to
get broken up and ruined; they do not care about Democratic votes, oh, no,
no, no! You must judge which class those belong to whom you meet: I leave
it to you to determine from the facts.
Let us notice some more of the stale charges against Republicans. You say
we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof
is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party
has no existence in your section--gets no votes in your section. The fact
is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in
case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your
section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this
conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will
probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get
votes in your section this very year. The fact that we get no votes in
your section is a fact of your making and not of ours. And if there be
fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until
you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we
ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started--to a
discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put
in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any
other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are
justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of
whether our principle put in practice would wrong your section; and so
meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do
you accept the challenge? No? Then you really believe that the principle
which our fathers who framed the Government under which we live thought so
clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their
official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand our condemnation
without a moment's consideration. Some of you delight to flaunt in our
faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his
Farewell Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that
warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an
act of Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern
Territory, which act embodied the policy of government upon that subject,
up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year
after he penned it he wrote La Fayette that he considered that prohibition
a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should
sometime have a confederacy of free States.
Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon
this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or
in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast
the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon
you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we
commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right
application of it.
But you say you are conservative--eminently conservative--while we
are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new
and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the
point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the
Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject and scout
and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.
True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be.
You have considerable variety of new propositions and plans, but you are
unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some
of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a congressional
slave code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the
Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits; some for maintaining
slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat
pur-rinciple" that if one man would enslave another, no third man should
object--fantastically called "popular sovereignty." But never a man among
you in favor of prohibition of slavery in Federal Territories, according
to the practice of our fathers who framed the Government under which
we live. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an
advocate in the century within which our Government originated. And yet
you draw yourselves up and say, "We are eminently conservative."
It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great confederacy shall
be at peace, and in harmony one with another. Let us Republicans do our
part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through
passion and ill-temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much
as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them
if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all
they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with
us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered
to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against
us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections
are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, in the future, if we have nothing
to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so
know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and
insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the
charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only
let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them
alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so
trying to convince them, from the very beginning of our organization, but
with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly
protested our purpose to let them alone; but this had no tendency to
convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they
have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will
convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join
them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly--done in
acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated--we must place
ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted
and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether
made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest
and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down
our free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of
all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe
that all their troubles proceed from us. So long as we call slavery wrong,
whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran
away because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever
a master cuts his slaves with a lash, and they cry out under it, he will
overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt,
and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist.
I am quite aware that they do not state their case precisely in this way.
Most of them would probably say to us, "Let us alone, do nothing to us,
and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone--have
never disturbed them--so that, after all, it is what we say which
dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we
cease saying.
I am also aware that they have not as yet in terms demanded the overthrow
of our free-State constitutions. Yet those constitutions declare the wrong
of slavery with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it;
and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow
of these constitutions will be demanded. It is nothing to the contrary
that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they
do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of
this consummation. Holding as they do that slavery is morally right,
and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national
recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.
Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction
that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, 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 on 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 view, 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 the
right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who would be neither a
living man nor a dead man--such as a policy of "don't care" on a question
about which all free men do care--such as Union appeals beseeching true
Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and caning,
not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance--such as invocations of
Washington, imploring men to unsay 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.
[As Mr. Lincoln concluded his address, there was witnessed the wildest
scene of enthusiasm and excitement that has been in New Haven for years.
The Palladium editorially says: "We give up most of our space to-day to
a very full report of the eloquent speech of the HON. Abraham Lincoln, of
Illinois, delivered last night at Union Hall."]
RESPONSE TO AN ELECTOR'S REQUEST FOR MONEY
TO ------------ March 16, 1860
As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I cannot enter the ring
on the money basis--first, because in the main it is wrong; and secondly,
I have not and cannot get the money.
I say, in the main, the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects in
a political contest, the use of some is both right and indispensable. With
me, as with yourself, the long struggle has been one of great pecuniary
loss.
I now distinctly say this--if you shall be appointed a delegate to
Chicago, I will furnish one hundred dollars to bear the expenses of the
trip.
Your friend as ever,
A. LINCOLN.
[Extract from a letter to a Kansas delegate.]
TO J. W. SOMERS.
SPRINGFIELD, March 17, 1860
JAMES W. SOMERS, Esq.
DEAR SIR:--Reaching home three days ago, I found your letter of February
26th. Considering your difficulty of hearing, I think you had better
settle in Chicago, if, as you say, a good man already in fair practice
there will take you into partnership. If you had not that difficulty, I
still should think it an even balance whether you would not better remain
in Chicago, with such a chance for copartnership.
If I went west, I think I would go to Kansas, to Leavenworth or Atchison.
Both of them are and will continue to be fine growing places.
I believe I have said all I can, and I have said it with the deepest
interest for your welfare.
Yours truly,
A. LINCOLN.
ACCUSATION OF HAVING BEEN PAID FOR A POLITICAL SPEECH
TO C. F. McNEIL.
SPRINGFIELD, April 6, 1860
C. F. MCNEIL, Esq.
DEAR SIR:--Reaching home yesterday, I found yours of the 23d March,
inclosing a slip from The Middleport Press. It is not true that I ever
charged anything for a political speech in my life; but this much is true:
Last October I was requested by letter to deliver some sort of speech in
Mr. Beecher's church, in Brooklyn--two hundred dollars being offered in
the first letter. I wrote that I could do it in February, provided they
would take a political speech if I could find time to get up no other.
They agreed; and subsequently I informed them the speech would have to
be a political one. When I reached New York, I for the first time learned
that the place was changed to "Cooper Institute." I made the speech, and
left for New Hampshire, where I have a son at school, neither asking for
pay nor having any offered me. Three days after a check for two hundred
dollars was sent to me at New Hampshire; and I took it, and did not know
it was wrong. My understanding now is--though I knew nothing of it at the
time--that they did charge for admittance to the Cooper Institute, and
that they took in more than twice two hundred dollars.
I have made this explanation to you as a friend; but I wish no explanation
made to our enemies. What they want is a squabble and a fuss, and that
they can have if we explain; and they cannot have it if we don't.
When I returned through New York from New England, I was told by the
gentlemen who sent me the Check that a drunken vagabond in the club,
having learned something about the two hundred dollars, made the
exhibition out of which The Herald manufactured the article quoted by The
Press of your town.
My judgment is, and therefore my request is, that you give no denial and
no explanation.
Thanking you for your kind interest in the matter, I remain, Yours truly,
A. LINCOLN.
TO H. TAYLOR.
SPRINGFIELD, ILL., April 21, 1860.
HAWKINS TAYLOR, Esq.
DEAR SIR:--Yours of the 15th is just received. It surprises me that you
have written twice, without receiving an answer. I have answered all I
ever received from you; and certainly one since my return from the East.
Opinions here, as to the prospect of Douglas being nominated, are quite
conflicting--some very confident he will, and others that he will not be.
I think his nomination possible, but that the chances are against him.
I am glad there is a prospect of your party passing this way to Chicago.
Wishing to make your visit here as pleasant as we can, we wish you to
notify us as soon as possible whether you come this way, how many, and
when you will arrive.
Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN
TELEGRAM TO A MEMBER OF THE ILLINOIS DELEGATION
AT THE CHICAGO CONVENTION. SPRINGFIELD, May 17? 1860.
I authorize no bargains and will be bound by none.
A. LINCOLN.
REPLY TO THE COMMITTEE SENT BY THE CHICAGO CONVENTION TO INFORM
LINCOLN OF HIS NOMINATION,
MAY 19, 1860.
Mr. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COMMITTEE:--I tender to you, and through
you to the Republican National Convention, and all the people represented
in it, my profoundest thanks for the high honor done me, which you
now formally announce. Deeply and even painfully sensible of the great
responsibility which is inseparable from this high honor--a responsibility
which I could almost wish had fallen upon some one of the far more eminent
men and experienced statesmen whose distinguished names were before the
convention--I shall, by your leave, consider more fully the resolutions of
the convention, denominated their platform, and without any unnecessary or
unreasonable delay respond to you, Mr. Chairman, in writing--not
doubting that the platform will be found satisfactory, and the nomination
gratefully accepted.
And now I will not longer defer the pleasure of taking you, and each of
you, by the hand.