Chicago, Ill., July 24, 1858. "Hon. S. A. Douglas:
"My dear Sir:--Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement
for you and myself to divide time and address the same audiences the
present canvass? Mr. Judd, who will hand you this, is authorized
to receive your answer; and, if agreeable to you, to enter into
the terms of such an arrangement.
"Your obedient servant,
"A. Lincoln."
This is the note received by Douglas a week after his return from
Springfield. On the same day he returned the following answer:
"Chicago, Ill., July 24, 1858. "Hon. A. Lincoln:
"Dear Sir:--Your note of this date * * * was handed me by Mr. Judd. *
* * I went to Springfield last week for the purpose of conferring
with the Democratic State Central Committee upon the mode of conducting the
canvass, and with them * * * made a list of appointments covering
the entire period until late in October. The people of the
several localities have been notified of the times and places of
the meetings. * * * I cannot refrain from expressing my surprise,
if it was your original intention to invite such an arrangement,
that you should have waited until after I had made my appointments,
in as much as we were both here in Chicago together for several
days after my arrival, and again at Bloomington, Atlanta, Lincoln
and Springfield, where it was well known I went for the purpose
of consulting with the State Central Committee and agreeing upon
the plan of campaign. * * * I will, in order to accommodate you,
as far as it is in my power to do so, take the responsibility of
making an arrangement with you for a discussion between us at one
prominent point in each congressional district in the State, except
the Second and Sixth, where we have both spoken and in each of
which you had the concluding speech. If agreeable to you, I will
indicate the following places as the most suitable in the several
congressional districts at which we should speak, to wit: Freeport,
Ottawa, Galesburg, Quincy, Alton, Jonesboro and Charleston. * * *
"Very respectfully, your most obedient servant,
"S. A. Douglas."
Lincoln replied:
"Springfield, July 29, 1858.
"Hon. S. A. Douglas:
Dear Sir:--Yours of the 24th in relation to an arrangement to divide
time and address the same audiences, is received; and, in apology
for not sooner replying, allow me to say that, when I sat by you at
dinner yesterday, I was not aware that you had answered my note,
nor, certainly, that my own note had been presented to you. An
hour after, I saw a copy of your answer in the Chicago Times, and
reaching home I found the original awaiting me. * * * As to your
surprise that I did not sooner make the proposal to divide time
with you, I can only say, I made it as soon as I resolved to make
it. I did not know but that such a proposal would come from you;
I waited respectfully to see. * * * I agree to an arrangement
for us to speak at the seven places you have named and at your own
times, provided you name the times at once, so that I, as well as
you, can have to myself the time not covered by the arrangement.
As to the other details, I wish perfect reciprocity, and no more.
I wish as much time as you and that conclusions shall alternate.
That is all.
"Your obedient servant,
"A. Lincoln."
On the next day Douglas wrote:
"Bement, Piatt Co., Ill., July 30, 1858.
"Dear Sir:--Your letter, dated yesterday, accepting my proposition
for a joint discussion at one prominent point in each congressional
district * * * was received this morning. The times and places
designated are as follows:
Ottawa, La Salle County ......... August 21, 1858.
Freeport, Stephenson County ..... August 27, 1858.
Jonesboro, Union County ...... September 15, 1858.
Charleston, Coles County ..... September 18, 1858.
Galesburgh, Knox County ......... October 7, 1858.
Quincy, Adams County ........... October 13, 1858.
Alton, Madison County .......... October 15, 1858.
"I agree to your suggestion that we shall alternately open and close
the discussion. I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply,
occupying an hour and a half, and I will then follow for half an
hour. At Freeport, you shall open the discussion and speak one hour;
I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for
half an hour. We will alternate in like manner in each successive
place.
"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
"S. A. Douglas."
To which Lincoln replied:
"Springfield, July 31, 1858.
"Hon. S. A. Douglas:
"Dear Sir:--Yours of yesterday, naming places, time and terms for
joint discussions, between us, was received this morning. Although
by the terms as you propose, you take four openings and closes
to my three, I accede, and thus close the arrangement. * * *
"Your obedient servant,
"A. Lincoln."
Now that Lincoln has become idealized and is safely classed
with the great men of all ages, his modest challenge seems like
a condescension of the immortal President to his rival. It then
seemed an act of temerity bordering on madness. Lincoln's friends
thought it rash. Douglas' friends had no hope that his adversary
would be so easily delivered into his hands.
Yet Lincoln was not a despised antagonist. He was the most prominent
Republican in Illinois. But Douglas was the recognized head of a
great national party, the giant of the Senate, the most resourceful
American statesman then living. Through years of desperate battling
he had successfully repelled the assaults of Seward, Sumner and
Chase. He had more recently encountered with equal ease all the
Southern Senators. It seemed a simple task to meet this humble
Western lawyer and make his friends ashamed of their senatorial
candidate. Douglas did not share the pleasant illusion of his
friends. Before leaving Washington, when he heard that Lincoln
was nominated, he said to Forney:
"I shall have my hands full. He is a strong man of his party,--full
of wit, facts, dates,--and the best stump speaker, with his droll
ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as his is shrewd;
and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won."
Lincoln was burning with jealousy. He believed himself to be
Douglas' full equal in mental endowment. Fortune, he thought, with
a tinge of bitterness, had dealt with them most unequally, clothing
his rival with the glory of a world-renowned statesman, and leaving
him to waste his powers on the obscure quarrels of litigious clients
in a small town. He yearned for the opportunity to measure himself
with the great Senator on a conspicuous stage.
This series of debates was a rare piece of strategy on Lincoln's
part. Douglas had so long been wrapped in his senatorial toga
that his greatness had become exaggerated to the popular mind of
Illinois; while Lincoln had been a plain, modest lawyer, moving
among the people in the daily round of routine life. The dogmatic
statement of the great Senator carried more weight than the
profoundest argument of the clearest demonstration of the country
lawyer. But these debates brought them to a common level. They
measured their intellectual strength in the presence of the people,
with all official trappings laid aside; and while no one could well
be disappointed in Douglas' strength, the whole country was amazed
at the unexpected power of Lincoln.
There were disadvantages to Douglas in this mode of combat. He
must sacrifice the glamour of senatorial dignity and enter the arena
on equal footing with his antagonist. He was a brilliant debater.
"In the whole field of American politics no man has equaled him
in the expedients and strategy of debate. * * * He was tireless,
ubiquitous, unseizable. It would have been as easy to hold
a globule of mercury under the finger's tip as to fasten him to a
point he desired to evade. * * * In spirit he was alert, combative,
aggressive; in manner patronizing and arrogant by turns." But
he had to meet in argument a man of imperturbably temper, who had
thought deeply on the great questions of the time, who by unerring
instinct could lay his finger on every flaw in his chain of
reasoning, could rise to heights of eloquence beyond the reach of
his unimaginative mind and pour out streams of quaint humor that
must have filled him with despair.
So great was the interest of the people in this extraordinary contest
that it was found impossible to hold the meetings in halls. They
were held during the warm autumn days in the open air, where the
crowds, numbering from five to twenty thousand, struggled to get
within range of the speakers' voices.
It would be difficult to conceive a more picturesque contest than
that now waged by these politicians as they strove for the mastery,
and the enormous crowds of friends and sympathizers listened with
intense interest to the weighty arguments, or shouted applause when
their favorite scored a point. The audiences, consisting largely
of farmers, who had made long journeys in wagons and lived in tents
or camped out in the open air while awaiting the great event, were
in stern earnest, despite their holiday appearance, and listened
with thoughtful faces and troubled hearts as the grave theme was
discussed which had distracted the country for years.
And the orators, who were unconsciously playing a great role on
the historic stage, were surely among the most interesting products
of modern times. Lincoln's lank, ungainly figure, nearly six and
a half feet tall, clad in loose fitting clothes, contrasted oddly
with the short, stout figure of Douglas, barely five feet in height,
trimly and rather sprucely dressed. The sad, calm face o Lincoln,
his humble and unheroic bearing, were in marked contrast with the
finely chiseled, powerful, defiant face and magnificent Napoleonic
head surmounting the short, thick neck of Douglas, who strode with
kingly air before he admiring throngs. The manner of Douglas was
so masterful and strong that a wavering audience must have been
swept away by it. His finely modulated voice reached with ease to
the utmost limits of the crowds as he thundered out his decisive
arguments or condescended to compliment his aspiring rival; while
Lincoln manifestly labored to so pitch his unmusical voice that the
distant listeners could hear, and was never betrayed into a single
gracious compliment to the distinguished Senator whose seat he
aspired to fill. And the contestants, however great their posthumous
fame, were as yet merely ambitious politicians, supremely interested
in winning the splendid prize. To Lincoln the possibility of a
seat in the Senate was stimulus enough. Douglas was in mid career,
assured of the Presidency in the near future, but compelled at all
hazards to hold the ground already won. His commanding eminence
attracted universal attention to the contest. He must not only
win, but bear himself throughout with the air of an assured conqueror.
With all their disparity of rank and fame, they were not badly
matched, and all the substantial advantages of the situation lay
with Lincoln. The greatness of Douglas' fame excited sympathy for
his rival. Success in the contest would give power and prestige to
Lincoln, and even defeat would not be humiliating. Douglas could
not expect much glory even from victory. Though he crushed his
opponent in argument, he must still measure himself with the Douglas
of the Senate and not fall below his own standard. In his contest
for the Senate, he must remember the Presidency and shape his
arguments for a larger audience than that addressed by Lincoln.
During the period of the debates both were actively engaged in the
State campaign, addressing one or two audiences daily, so arranging
their routes as to meet at the appointed times and places. On
August 21st, in presence of a vast multitude, Douglas opened the
first debate at Ottawa.
"Prior to 1854," he said, "this country was divided into two great
political parties, known as the Whig and Democratic parties. Both
were national and patriotic. * * * Whig principles had no boundary
sectional line, * * * but applied and were proclaimed wherever the
Constitution ruled or the American flag waved over American soil.
So it was, and so it is, with the great Democratic party, which
from the days of Jefferson to this period has proven itself to be
the historic party of this Nation. * * * The Whig party and the
Democratic party jointly adopted the Compromise measures of 1850
as the basis of a proper and just solution of this slavery question
in all its forms. Clay was the great leader, with Webster on his
right and Cass on his left, and sustained by the patriots in the
Whig and Democratic ranks. * * * * In 1851 the Whig party and the
Democratic party united in Illinois in approving the principles of
the Compromise measures of 1850. * * * In 1852 the Whig party in
Convention at Baltimore declared the Compromise measures of 1850
a suitable adjustment of that question. * * * * The Democratic
Convention assembled in Baltimore the same year and adopted the
Compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of Democratic action. *
* * They both stood on the same platform with regard to the slavery
question. That platform was the right of the people of each State
and Territory to decide their local and domestic institutions for
themselves, subject only to the Federal Constitution.
"In 1854 I introduced into the Senate a bill to organize the
Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on that principle which had
been adopted in the Compromise measures of 1850, and indorsed by
the Whig party and the Democratic party in National Convention in
1852. * * * Thus you see that up to 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska
bill was brought into Congress for the purpose of carrying out the
principles which both parties up to that time had indorsed and
approved, there was no division of opinion in this country in regard
to that principle, except the opposition of the Abolitionists. In
the House of Representatives of Illinois upon a resolution asserting
that principle every Whig and every Democrat voted in the affirmative."
In 1854 Lincoln, the leader of the Whigs, and Trumbull, one of
the Democratic chiefs, entered into an arrangement to dissolve the
old Whig and Democratic parties and to unite the members of both
into the Abolition party under the name and guise of a Republican
party. The terms were that Lincoln should have Shield's place in
the Senate, then about to become vacant, and that Trumbull should
have Douglas' seat when his term expired. Lincoln went to work to
Abolitionize the old Whig party, pretending that he was as good a
Whig as ever, and Trumbull began preaching Abolitionism in milder
and lighter form, hoping to Abolitionize the Democratic party.
The party met at Springfield in October, 1854, and proclaimed its
platform. This document christened the coalition the Republican
party. It pledged the party to bring the administration of the
Government back to the control of first principles; to restore
Kansas and Nebraska to the position of free Territories; to repeal
the Fugitive Slave Law; to restrict slavery to those States in
which it existed; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States
into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to
exclude it from all the Territories and resist the acquirement of
more unless it should be prohibited therein. He asked Lincoln to
answer whether he stood pledged to each article in that creed and
would carry it out.
"I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions in order that
when I trot him down to lower Egypt (Southern Illinois) I may put
the same questions to him. My principles are the same everywhere.
I can proclaim them alike in the North and the South, the East
and the West. My principles will apply wherever the Constitution
prevails and the American flag waves. I desire to know whether
Mr. Lincoln's principles will bear transplanting from Ottawa
to Jonesboro. I put these questions to him to-day distinctly and
ask an answer. I have a right to an answer, for I quote from the
platform of the Republican party, made by himself and others at the
time that party was formed and bargain made by Lincoln to dissolve
and kill the old Whig party and transfer its members, bound hand
and foot to the Abolition party. * * * I mean nothing personally
disrespectful or unkind to Lincoln. I have known him for nearly
twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us
when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys and
both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school
teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery
keeper in the town of Salem. * * * I made as good a school teacher
as I could and, when a cabinet maker, I made a good bedstead and
tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus
and secretaries than anything else. * * * Lincoln was then just
as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the
boys wrestling or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing
a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town
together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided
at a horse race or a fist fight excited the admiration and won the
praise of everybody."
After Lincoln and Trumbull had formed their combination to
Abolitionize the old parties and put themselves into the Senate, he
said, Trumbull broke faith by demanding Shield's place for himself
when it fell vacant and leaving Lincoln to fight for Douglas' seat
two years later. Trumbull was stumping the State for Lincoln in
order to quiet him. Lincoln was opposed to the Dred Scott decision
and would not submit to it because it deprived the negro of the
rights and privileges of citizenship.
"Do you desire," he asked, "to * * * allow the free negroes to flow
in and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire
to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that
when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand
emancipated slaves into Illinois to become citizens and voters
on an equality with yourselves? * * * Mr. Lincoln, following the
example and lead of all the little Abolition orators who go around
and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from
the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal,
and then asks, 'How can you deprive the negro of that equality
which God and the Declaration of Independence awards him?'" * * *
"Now I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to
be the equal of the white man. If he did he has been a long time
demonstrating the fact. For thousands of years the negro has been
a race upon the earth and during all that time, in all latitudes
and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been
inferior to the race which he there met. He belongs to an inferior
race and must always occupy an inferior position. The question,
what rights and privileges shall be conferred on the negro, is
one which each State and Territory must decide for itself. This
doctrine of Mr. Lincoln, of uniformity among the institutions
of the different States, is a new doctrine, never dreamed of by
Washington, Madison or the founders of this Government. Mr. Lincoln
and the Republican party set themselves up as wiser than these men
who made this Government which has flourished for seventy years
under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right
of each state to do as it pleased. Under that principle we have
grown from a nation of three or four millions to a nation of about
thirty millions of people; we have crossed the Allegheny Mountains
and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairie into a garden
and building up churches and schools, thus spreading civilization
and Christianity where before there was nothing but savage barbarism.
"Under that principle we have become, from a feeble nation, the
most powerful on the face of the earth; and if we only adhere to
that principle, we can go forward increasing in territory, in power,
in strength and in glory, until the Republic of America shall be the
North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the
civilized world. * * * I believe that this new doctrine preached
by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds.
They are trying to array all the Northern States in one body against
the South, to excite a sectional war between the free States and
the slave States, in order that the one or the other may be driven
to the wall."
When the applause subsided, Lincoln rose to reply. Addressing
himself first to the personal matters contained in Douglas' speech, he
denied the charge of a secret bargain between himself and Trumbull
dividing the two seats in the Senate between them. "All I have
to say upon that subject is, that I think no man--not even Judge
Douglas--can prove it, because it is not true." He denied utterly
that he had anything to do with the Republican platform drafted by
the party leaders in 1854, having refused to meet with the committee
or take any part in the organization.
"I have no means," he said, " of totally disproving such charges
as this. I cannot prove a negative; but have a right to say that,
when he makes an affirmative charge, he must offer some proof of
its truth. Douglas' argument about 'perfect social and political
equality with the negro' is but a specious and fantastic arrangement
of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut
horse. I will say here, while upon the subject, that I have no
purpose directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution
of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no
lawful right to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political
and social equality between the white and black races. There is
a physical difference between the two, which in my judgement will
forever forbid their living together upon a footing of perfect
equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must
be a difference, I am in favor of the race to which I belong having
the superior position. I agree with Judge Douglas that the negro
is not my equal in many respects--certainly not in color--perhaps
not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat
the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand
earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and
the equal of every living man. * * *
"In the history of our Government this institution of slavery
has always been an apple of discord and an element of division in
the house. I have a right to say that in regard to this question
the Union is a house divided against itself. The public mind
did formerly rest in the belief that slavery was in the course of
ultimate extinction. But lately Douglas and those acting with him
have placed it on a new basis which looks to the perpetuity and
nationalization of slavery. * * * * I believe we shall not have
peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the
further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest
in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or,
on the other hand, that its advocates will push it forward until
it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new,
North as well as South.
"Now, I believe if we could arrest the spread and place it where
Washington and Jefferson and Madison paced it, it would be in the
course of ultimate extinction and the public mind would, as for
eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate
extinction. The crisis would be passed and the institution might
be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the
States where it exists; yet it would be going out of existence in
the way best for both the black and the white races. * * * Popular
sovereignty as now applied to the question of slavery, does allow
the people of a Territory to have slavery if they want it, but
does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it. * * *
As I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants slaves
all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them. * * *
"The Nebraska bill contains this clause: 'It being the true intent
and meaning of this bill not to legislate slavery into any Territory
or STATE.' I have always been puzzled to know what business the
word State had in that connection. Judge Douglas knows. He put
it there. * * * What was it placed there for? After seeing the
Dred Scott decision, which holds that the people cannot exclude
slavery from a Territory, if another Dred Scott decision shall come
holding that they cannot exclude it from a State, we shall discover
that when the word was originally put there it was in view of
something that was to come in due time, we shall see that it was
the other half of something.
"I ask the attention of the people here assembled to the course that
Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question
of making slavery national. In the first place what is necessary
to make slavery national? Not war. There is no danger that the
people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young
nigger stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them
upon us. There is no danger of our going over there and making
war upon them. Then what is necessary for the nationalization of
slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott decision. It is merely
for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution
can exclude it, just as they have already decided that Congress
nor the territorial legislature can do it. When that is decided
and acquiesced in the whole thing is done. * * * Let us consider
what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end. What influence
is he exerting on public sentiment? With public sentiment nothing
can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who
moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or
pronounces decisions. He makes statutes possible or impossible
to be executed. * * *
"Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence. Consider the attitude
he occupies at the head of a large party. This man sticks to
a decision which forbids the people of a Territory from excluding
slavery, and he does so not because it is right in itself, but
because it has been decided by the Court; and, being decided by
the Court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political
action as law. * * * You will bear in mind that thus committing
himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one
just as firmly as to this. The next decision, as much as this,
will be a 'Thus saith the Lord.' It is nothing that I point out to
him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in
the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson
did not so believe. He claims now 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. And I remind him of another piece of history on
the question of respect for judicial decisions belonging to a time
when the large party to which Judge Douglas belongs were displeased
with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they had
decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State. I
know that he will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing
that decision by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote
down the four older ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's
sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new Judges to
break down the four old ones.
"Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to
sit as members of a Court will have to catechized beforehand upon
some subject, I say, 'You know, Judge; you have tried it.' When
he says a Court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men,
will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, 'You
know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.' But I cannot
shake Judge Douglas' teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision. Like
some obstinate animal that will hang on, when he has once got his
teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm,
still he will not relax his hold. He hangs to the last to the
Dred Scott decision. These things show there is a purpose strong
as death and eternity for which he adheres to this decision and for
which he will adhere to all other decisions of the same Court. *
* * When he invites any people willing to have slavery to establish
it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he
cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up--that is the
sacred right of self-government--he is, in my judgement, penetrating
the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and
the love of liberty. * * *
"And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances,
he shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance
with his own; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all
these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and to
avow his principles and to say all that he says on these mighty
questions, then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott
decision, which he endorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful
in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
Douglas, in his brief reply, reminded the audience that Lincoln
had not frankly answered the question put in his opening speech;
whether he approved of each article of the Republican resolutions
adopted in Springfield in October, 1854. Lincoln's only answer had
been that he was not present and had nothing to do with drafting
the resolutions. "But this denial is a miserable quibble to avoid
the main issue, which is that this Republican platform declares in
favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. His
reply to all these questions is 'I was not on the Committee at the
time; I was up in Tazewell County trying a case.' I put to him
the question whether, if the people of the Territory, when they had
sufficient population to make a State, should form their Constitution
recognizing slavery, he would vote for or against its admission?
He is a candidate for the United States Senate and it is possible
that, if he should be elected, he would have to vote directly on
that question. He dodges it also under the cover that he was not
on the Committee. * * * He knows I will trot him down to Egypt.
I intend to make him answer there. * * * The Convention to which
I have been alluding pledges itself to exclude slavery from all the
Territories. * * * I want to know whether he approves that provision.
* * * I want to know whether he will resist the acquirement of any
more territory, unless slavery therein shall be prohibited. These
are practical questions, based upon the fundamental principles of
the black Republican party; and I want to know whether he is the
first, last and only choice of a party with whom he does not agree
in principle.
"He does not deny but that that principle was unanimously adopted
by the Republican party; and now I want to know whether that party
is unanimously in favor of a man who does not adopt that creed and
agree with them in their principles; I want to know whether the
man who does not agree with them and who is afraid to avow his
differences is the first, last and only choice of the party. *
* * The party stands pledged that they will never support Lincoln
until he has pledged himself to that platform; but he cannot devise
his answer. He has not made up his mind whether he will or not.
* * * I have not brought a charge of moral turpitude against
him. When he brings one against me, instead of disproving it
I will say that it is a lie and let him prove it if he can. * * *
"Mr. Lincoln has not character enough for integrity and truth merely
on his own ipse dixit to arraign President Buchanan, President
Pierce and nine Judges of the Supreme Court, not one of whom would
be complimented by being put on an equality with him. There is
an unpardonable presumption in any man putting himself up before
thousands of people and pretending that his ipse dixit, without
proof, without fact and without truth, is enough to bring down and
destroy the purest and best of living men. * * * The word 'State'
as well as 'Territory' was put into the Nebraska bill to knock in
the head this Abolition doctrine that there will be no more slave
States even if the people want them. * * * The people of Missouri
formed a Constitution as a slave State and asked admission into the
Union; but the Free Soil party of the North, being in a majority,
refused to admit her because she had slavery as one of her
institutions. Hence, the first slavery agitation arouse upon a
State and not upon a Territory. * * * The whole Abolition agitation
arose on that doctrine of prohibiting a State from coming in with
slavery or not as it pleased, and that same doctrine is here in
this Republican platform of 1854."
The peculiar difficult of meeting Douglas in argument before a
popular audience is here exhibited in its most perfect form. The
persuasive force of his last proposition lay in a most ingenious
play on the words "State" and "Territory." Although the people
of Missouri had formed a State Constitution, they did not become
a State until Congress approved it and formally admitted them.
During the entire period of dispute they continued a Territory.
Douglas' argument assumes that they became a State on forming a
Constitution.