LINCOLN'S OHIO SPEECHES
When Lincoln, in opening the Senatorial campaign of Illinois, declared
that the Republican cause must be intrusted to its own undoubted
friends "who do care for the result," he displayed a much better
understanding of the character and aims of his opponent than those
who, not so well informed, desired the adoption of a different course.
Had the wishes of Greeley and others prevailed, had Douglas been
adopted by the Illinois Republicans, the party would have found itself
in a fatal dilemma, No sooner was the campaign closed than Douglas,
having entered on his tour through the South, began making speeches,
apparently designed to pave his way to a nomination for President by
the next Democratic National Convention. Realizing that he had lost
ground by his anti-Lecomptonism, and especially by his Freeport
doctrine, and having felt in the late campaign the hostility of the
Buchanan Administration, he now sought to recover prestige by
publishing more advanced opinions indirectly sustaining and defending
slavery.
Hitherto he had declared he did not care whether slavery was voted
down or voted up. He had said he would not argue the question whether
slavery was right or wrong. He had adopted Taney's assertion that the
negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence. He had asserted
that uniformity was impossible, but that freedom and slavery might
abide together forever. But now that the election was over and a new
term in the Senate secure, he was ready to conciliate pro-slavery
opinion with stronger expressions. Hence, in a speech at Memphis, he
cunningly linked together in argument unfriendly legislation, slavery,
and annexation. He said: "Whenever a Territory has a climate, soil,
and production making it the interest of the inhabitants to encourage
slave property, they will pass a slave code."
Wherever these preclude the possibility of slavery being profitable,
they will not permit it. On the sugar plantations of Louisiana it was
not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the
negro and the crocodile. He would say that between the negro and the
crocodile, he took the side of the negro; but between the negro and
the white man, he would go for the white man. The Almighty has drawn
the line on this continent, on the one side of which the soil must be
cultivated by slave labor; on the other by white labor. That line did
not run on 36º and 30' [the Missouri Compromise line], for 36º and 30'
runs over mountains and through valleys. But this slave line, he said,
meanders in the sugar-fields and plantations of the South, and the
people living in their different localities and in the Territories
must determine for themselves whether their "middle bed" is best
adapted to slavery or free labor.
[Sidenote] Douglas, Memphis Speech, Nov. 29, 1858. Memphis "Eagle
and Enquirer."
Referring to annexation, he said our destiny had forced us to acquire
Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. "We have now
territory enough, but how long will it be enough? One hive is enough
for one swarm of bees, but a new swarm comes next year and a new hive
is wanted." Men may say we shall never want anything more of Mexico,
but the time would come when we would be compelled to take more.
Central America was half-way to California and on the direct road. The
time will come when our destiny, our institutions, our safety will
compel us to have it. "So it is," concluded he, "with the island of
Cuba.... It is a matter of no consequence whether we want it or not;
we are compelled to take it, and we can't help it".
[Sidenote] Douglas, New Orleans Speech, Dec. 6, 1858. Pamphlet.
When Douglas reached New Orleans he substantially repeated these
declarations in another long speech, and, as if he had not yet placed
himself in entire harmony with Southern opinion, he added a sentiment
almost as remarkable as the "mudsill" theory of Hammond, or the later
"cornerstone" doctrine of Stephens: "It is a law of humanity," said
he, "a law of civilization, that whenever a man or a race of men show
themselves incapable of managing their own affairs, they must consent
to be governed by those who are capable of performing the duty. It is
on this principle that you establish those institutions of charity for
the support of the blind, or the deaf and dumb, or the insane. In
accordance with this principle, I assert that the negro race, under
all circumstances, at all times, and in all countries, has shown
itself incapable of self-government."
[Sidenote] Douglas, Baltimore Speech, Jan. 5, 1859. Pamphlet.
Once more, in a speech at Baltimore, Douglas repeated in substance
what he had said at Memphis and New Orleans, and then in the beginning
of January, 1859, he reached Washington and took his seat in the
Senate. Here he began to comprehend the action of the Democratic
caucus in deposing him from the chairmanship of the Committee on
Territories. His personal influence and prestige among the Southern
leaders were gone. Neither his revived zeal for annexation, nor his
advanced views on the necessity for slave labor, restored his
good-fellowship with the extremists. Although, pursuant to a
recommendation in the annual message, a measure was then pending in
the Senate to place thirty millions in the hands of President Buchanan
with which to negotiate for Cuba, the attitude of the pro-slavery
faction was not one of conciliation, but of unrelenting opposition to
him.
[Sidenote] Brown, Senate Speech, Feb. 28, 1859. "Globe," pp. 1241
_et seq_.
Towards the close of the short session this feeling broke out in an
open demonstration. On February 23, while an item of the appropriation
bill was under debate, Senator Brown, of Mississippi, said he wanted
the success of the Democratic party in 1860 to be a success of
principles and not of men. He neither wanted to cheat nor be cheated.
Under the decision of the Supreme Court the South would demand
protection for slavery in the Territories. If he understood the
Senator from Illinois, Mr. Douglas, he thought a Territorial
Legislature might by non-action or by unfriendly action rightfully
exclude slavery. He dissented from him, and now he would like to know
from other Senators from the North what they would do: "If the
Territorial Legislature refuses to act, will you act? If it pass
unfriendly acts, will you pass friendly? If it pass laws hostile to
slavery, will you annul them and substitute laws favoring slavery in
their stead?... I would rather," concluded he "see the Democratic
party sunk, never to be resurrected, than to see it successful only
that one portion of it might practice a fraud on another."
[Sidenote] Brown, Senate Speech, Feb. 28, 1859. "Globe," pp. 1246-7.
Douglas met the issue, and defended his Freeport doctrine without
flinching. The Democracy of the North hold, said he, that "if you
repudiate the doctrine of non-intervention, and form a slave code by
act of Congress, where the people of a Territory refuse it, you must
step off the Democratic platform. I tell you, gentlemen of the South,
in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry
any one Democratic State of the North on the platform that it is the
duty of the Federal Government to force the people of a Territory to
have slavery when they do not want it."
The discussion extended itself to other Senators; Jefferson Davis, of
Mississippi, Clay, of Alabama, Mason, of Virginia, and Gwin, of
California, seconded the demands and arguments of Brown; while Pugh,
of Ohio, Broderick, of California, and Stuart, of Michigan, came to
the help and defense of Douglas and non-intervention. Several
Republicans drifted into the debate on behalf of the position and
principles of their party, which of course differed from those of both
Brown and Douglas. The discussion was continued to a late hour, and
finally came to an end through mere lapse of time, but not until an
irreparable schism in the Democratic party had been opened.
[Sidenote] Douglas to Dorr, June 22, 1859. Baltimore "Sun," June
24, 1859.
Silence upon so vital an issue could not long be maintained. In the
following June, an Iowa friend wrote to Douglas to inquire whether he
would be a candidate for the Presidential nomination at the coming
Charleston Convention. Douglas replied that party issues must first
be defined. If the Democracy adhered to their former principles,
his friends would be at liberty to present his name. "If, on the
contrary," continued he, "it shall become the policy of the Democratic
party, which I cannot anticipate, to repudiate these their
time-honored principles, on which we have achieved so many patriotic
triumphs, and in lieu of them the convention shall interpolate into
the creed of the party such new issues as the revival of the African
slave-trade, or a Congressional slave-code for the Territories, or the
doctrine that the Constitution of the United States either establishes
or prohibits slavery in the Territories beyond the power of the people
legally to control it, as other property--it is due to candor to say
that, in such an event, I could not accept the nomination if tendered
to me."
[Sidenote] Ray to Lincoln, July 27, 1858. MS.
We must leave the career of Douglas for a while, to follow up the
personal history of Lincoln. The peculiar attitude of national
politics had in the previous year drawn the attention of the whole
country to Illinois in a remarkable degree. The Senatorial campaign
was hardly opened when a Chicago editor, whose daily examination of a
large list of newspaper exchanges brought the fact vividly under his
observation, wrote to Lincoln: "You are like Byron, who woke up one
morning and found himself famous. People wish to know about you. You
have sprung at once from the position of a capital fellow, and a
leading lawyer in Illinois, to a national reputation."
[Illustration: DAVID COLBRETH BRODERICK.]
[Sidenote] David Davis to Lincoln, Nov. 7, 1858. MS.
The compliment was fully warranted; the personal interest in Lincoln
increased daily from the beginning to the end of the great debates.
The Freeport doctrine and its effect upon the Democratic party gave
these discussions both present significance and a growing interest for
the future. Another friend wrote him, a few days after election: "You
have made a noble canvass, which, if unavailing in this State, has
earned you a national reputation, and made you friends everywhere."
[Sidenote] Delahay to Lincoln, March 15, 1859. MS.
[Sidenote] Dorsheimer to Chase, Sept. 12, 1859. MS.
[Sidenote] Kasson to Lincoln, Sept. 13, 1859. MS.
[Sidenote] Kirkpatrick to Lincoln, Sept. 15, 1859. MS.
[Sidenote] Weed to Judd, Oct. 21, 1859. MS.
[Sidenote] Dennison to Trumbull, July 21, 1859. MS.
That this was not the mere flattery of partial friends became manifest
to him by other indications; by an increased correspondence filled
with general commendation, and particularly by numerous invitations to
deliver speeches in other States. The Republican Central Committee of
New Hampshire wrote him that if Douglas came, as was expected, to that
State, they desired Lincoln to come and answer him. The Central
Committee of Minnesota wished him to come there and assist in their
canvass. There was an incessant commotion in politics throughout the
whole North, and as the season advanced calls came from all quarters.
Kansas wanted him; Buffalo, Des Moines, Pittsburgh wanted him; Thurlow
Weed telegraphed: "Send Abraham Lincoln to Albany immediately." Not
only his presence, but his arguments, and ideas, were in demand.
Dennison, making the canvass for Governor of Ohio, asked for a report
of his debates for campaign "material."
That men in all parts of the Union were thus turning to him for help
and counsel was due, not alone to the publicity and credit he had
gained in his debates with Douglas in the previous year; it grew quite
as much out of the fact that by his sagacity and courage he had made
himself the safest, as well as the most available, rallying-point of
the Republican party and exponent of Republican doctrine. The
Lecompton quarrel in the Democratic party had led many prominent
Republicans on a false trail. In Douglas's new attitude, developed by
his Southern speeches and his claim to readmission into regular
Democratic fellowship, these leaders found themselves at fault,
discredited by their own course. Lincoln, on the contrary, not only
held aloft the most aggressive Republican banner, but stood nearest
the common party enemy, and was able to offer advice to all the
elements of the Republican party, free from any suspicion of intrigue
with foe or faction. The causes of his Senatorial defeat thus gave him
a certain party authority and leadership, which were felt if not
openly acknowledged. On his part, while never officious or obtrusive,
he was always ready with seasonable and judicious suggestions,
generous in spirit and comprehensive in scope, and which looked beyond
mere local success.
Thus he wrote from Springfield to Schuyler Colfax (afterwards
Vice-President of the United States), July 6, 1859: "I much regret not
seeing you while you were here among us. Before learning that you were
to be at Jacksonville on the 4th, I had given my word to be at another
place. Besides a strong desire to make your personal acquaintance, I
was anxious to speak with you on politics a little more fully than I
can well do in a letter. My main object in such conversation would be
to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and
particularly for the contest of 1860. The point of danger is the
temptation in different localities to 'platform' for something which
will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a
firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a national convention. As
instances, the movement against foreigners in Massachusetts; in New
Hampshire, to make obedience to the fugitive-slave law punishable as a
crime; in Ohio, to repeal the fugitive-slave law; and, squatter
sovereignty, in Kansas. In these things there is explosive matter
enough to blow up half a dozen national conventions, if it gets into
them; and what gets very rife outside of conventions is very likely to
find its way into them. What is desirable, if possible, is that in
every local convocation of Republicans a point should be made to avoid
everything which will disturb Republicans elsewhere. Massachusetts
Republicans should have looked beyond their noses, and then they could
not have failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us
in the whole Northwest. New Hampshire and Ohio should forbear tilting
against the fugitive-slave law in such way as to utterly overwhelm us
in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the Constitution itself.
Kansas, in her confidence that she can be saved to freedom on
'squatter sovereignty,' ought not to forget that to prevent the spread
and nationalization of slavery is a national concern, and must be
attended to by the nation. In a word, in every locality we should look
beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is
probable we shall disagree. I write this for your eye only; hoping,
however, if you see danger as I think I do, you will do what you can
to avert it. Could not suggestions be made to leading men in the State
and Congressional conventions, and so avoid, to some extent at least,
these apples of discord."[1]
[Sidenote] Colfax to Lincoln, July 14, 1859. MS.
By this time Colfax was cured of his late coquetting with Douglas, and
he replied: "The suggestions you make have occurred to me.... Nothing
is more evident than that there is an ample number of voters in the
Northern States, opposed to the extension and aggressions of slavery
and to Democratic misrule, to triumphantly elect a President of the
United States. But it is equally evident that making up this majority
are men of all shades and gradations of opinion, from the conservative
who will scarcely defend his principles for fear of imperiling peace,
to the bold radical who strikes stalwart blows regardless of policy or
popularity. How this mass of mind shall be consolidated into a
victorious phalanx in 1860 is the great problem, I think, of our
eventful times. And he who could accomplish it is worthier of fame
than Napoleon or Victor Emmanuel.... In this work, to achieve success,
and to achieve it without sacrifice of essential principle, you can do
far more than one like myself, so much younger. Your counsel carries
great weight with it; for, to be plain, there is no political letter
that falls from your pen which is not copied throughout the Union."
[Sidenote] Lincoln to Canisius, May 17, 1859.
This allusion was called out by two letters which Lincoln had written
during the year; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of
know-nothingism, in which he also defined his position on "fusion."
Referring to a provision lately adopted by Massachusetts to restrict
naturalization, he wrote: "Massachusetts is a sovereign and
independent State; and it is no privilege of mine to scold her for
what she does. Still, if from what she has done, an inference is
sought to be drawn as to what I would do, I may, without impropriety,
speak out, I say then, that, as I understand the Massachusetts
provision, I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other
place where I have a right to oppose it. Understanding the spirit of
our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to
whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for
commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be
strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the
existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and
speaking different languages from myself. As to the matter of fusion,
I am for it, if it can be had on Republican grounds; and I am not for
it on any other terms. A fusion on any other terms would be as foolish
and unprincipled. It would lose the whole North, while the common
enemy would still carry the whole South. The question of men is a
different one. There are good patriotic men and able statesmen in the
South whom I would cheerfully support, if they would now place
themselves on Republican ground, but I am against letting down the
Republican standard a hair's breadth."
The other was a somewhat longer letter, to a Boston committee which
had invited him to a festival in honor of Jefferson's birthday.
"Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago two great political
parties were first formed in this country; that Thomas Jefferson was
the head of one of them, and Boston the headquarters of the other, it
is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend
politically from the party opposed to Jefferson, should now be
celebrating his birthday, in their own original seat of empire, while
those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to
breathe his name everywhere...."
[Sidenote] Lincoln to Pierce and others, April 6, 1859.
"But, soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of
Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with
great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the
simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would
fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms.
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free
society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of
success. One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another
bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue
that they apply only to 'superior races.' These expressions, differing
in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the
principles of free government, and restoring those of classification,
caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned
heads plotting against the people. They are the van-guard--the miners
and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will
subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no
slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others
deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long
retain it. All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete
pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people,
had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and
all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming
days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers
of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Lincoln's more important political work of the year 1859 was the part
he took in the canvass in the State of Ohio, where a governor was to
be chosen at the October election, and where the result would decide
not merely the present and local strength of the rival candidates, but
also to some extent indicate the prospects and probabilities of the
Presidential campaign of 1860. The Ohio Democrats had called Douglas
into their canvass, and the Republicans, as soon as they learned the
fact, arranged that Lincoln should come and answer him. There was a
fitness in this, not merely because Lincoln's joint debates with him
in Illinois in the previous summer were so successful, but also
because Douglas in nearly every speech made since then, both in his
Southern tour and elsewhere, alluded to the Illinois campaign, and to
Lincoln by name, especially to what he characterized as his political
heresies. By thus everywhere making Lincoln and Lincoln's utterances a
public target, Douglas himself, in effect, prolonged and extended the
joint debates over the whole Union. Another circumstance added to the
momentary interest of the general discussion. Douglas was by nature
aggressive. Determined to hold his Northern followers in the new
issues which had grown out of his Freeport doctrine, and the new
antagonisms which the recent slave code debate in the Senate revealed,
he wrote and published in "Harper's Magazine" for September, 1859, a
political article beginning with the assertion 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." Quoting both the paragraph of Lincoln's Springfield speech
declaring that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," and the
paragraph from Seward's Rochester speech, announcing the
"irrepressible conflict," Douglas made a long historical examination
of his own theory of "non-intervention" and "popular sovereignty," and
built up an elaborate argument to sustain his course. The novelty of
this appeal to the public occasioned general interest and varied
comment, and the expedient seemed so ingenious as to excite the envy
of Administration Democrats. Accordingly, Attorney-General Black, of
President Buchanan's Cabinet, at "the request of friends," wrote,
printed, and circulated an anonymous pamphlet in answer, in which he
admitted that Douglas was "not the man to be treated with a disdainful
silence," but characterized the "Harper" essay as "an unsuccessful
effort at legal precision; like the writing of a judge who is trying
in vain to give good reasons for a wrong decision on a question of law
which he has not quite mastered." Douglas, in a speech at Wooster,
Ohio, criticized this performance of Black's. Reply and rejoinder on
both sides followed in due time; and this war of pamphlets was one of
the prominent political incidents of the year.
Thus Lincoln's advent in the Ohio campaign attracted much more than
usual notice. He made but two speeches, one at Columbus, and one at
Cincinnati, at each of which places Douglas had recently preceded him.
Lincoln's addresses not only brought him large and appreciative
audiences, but they obtained an unprecedented circulation in print. In
the main, they reproduced and tersely re-applied the ideas and
arguments developed in the Senatorial campaign in Illinois, adding,
however, searching comments on the newer positions and points to which
Douglas had since advanced. There is only space to insert a few
disconnected quotations:
Now, what is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty? 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....
If you will read the copyright essay, you will discover that Judge
Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies
and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question
in 1699, and continued from that time until the Revolution; and,
while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with
more or less violence ever since the Revolution....
Take these two things and consider them together; present the
question of planting a State with the institution of slavery by
the side of a question of who shall be Governor of Kansas for a
year or two, and is there a man here, is there a man on earth, who
would not say the governor question is the little one, and the
slavery question is the great one? I ask any honest Democrat if
the small, the local, the trivial and temporary question is not,
Who shall be governor? while the durable, the important, and the
mischievous one is, Shall this soil be planted with slavery? This
is an idea, I suppose, which has arisen in Judge Douglas's mind
from his peculiar structure. 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....
The Dred Scott decision expressly gives every citizen of the
United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States
Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that
the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the
Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the
trash, the words, the collateral matter was cleared away from it,
all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity; no
less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it
has a lawful right to be....
The Judge says the people of the Territories have the right, by
his principle, to have slaves if they want them. Then I say that
the people in Georgia have the right to buy slaves in Africa if
they want them, and I defy any man on earth to show any
distinction between the two things--to show that the one is either
more wicked or more unlawful; to show on original principles, that
one is better or worse than the other; or to show by the
Constitution, that one differs a whit from the other. He will tell
me, doubtless, that there is no constitutional provision against
people taking slaves into the new Territories, and I tell him that
there is equally no constitutional provision against buying slaves
in Africa....
Then I say, if this principle is established, that there is no
wrong in slavery, and whoever wants it has a right to have it;
that it is a matter of dollars and cents; a sort of question how
they shall deal with brutes; that between us and the negro here
there is no sort of question, but that at the South the question
is between the negro and the crocodile; that it is a mere matter
of policy; that there is a perfect right according to interest to
do just as you please--when this is done, where this doctrine
prevails, the miners and sappers will have formed public opinion
for the slave trade....
[Sidenote] Lincoln, Columbus Speech, Sept. 16, 1859. Debates, pp.
253-54
Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like
ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have
already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have
stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it. Now,
if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask
you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be
plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared
to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public
sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn
of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is
constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular
sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your
minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for all
these things; and you will receive and support, or submit to, the
slave trade revived with all its horrors, a slave code enforced in
our Territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up
into the very heart of the free North.
This Government is expressly charged with the duty of providing
for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and
perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general
welfare. We believe--nay, we know, that this is the only thing
that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself....
[Sidenote] Lincoln Cincinnati Speech, Sept. 17, 1859. Debates, pp.
267-8.
I say we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the
States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and
the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not
withhold an efficient fugitive-slave law, because the Constitution
requires us, as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But
we must prevent the outspreading of the institution, because
neither the Constitution nor the general welfare requires us to
extend it. We must prevent the revival of the African slave trade,
and the enacting by Congress of a Territorial slave code. We must
prevent each of these things being done by either congresses or
courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters
of both congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution,
but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
[Sidenote] Parsons and others to Lincoln, Dec. 7, 1859. Debates,
preface.
The Ohio Republicans gained a decided success at the October election.
Ascribing this result in a large measure to the influence of Lincoln's
speeches, the State Executive Committee resolved to publish in cheap
book form the full Illinois joint debates and the two Ohio addresses,
to serve as campaign material for the ensuing year. "We regard them,"
wrote the committee to Lincoln, "as luminous and triumphant
expositions of the doctrines of the Republican party, successfully
vindicated from the aspersions of its foes, and calculated to make a
document of great practical service to the Republican party in the
approaching Presidential contest."
[Sidenote] Lincoln to Parsons and others, Dec. 19, 1859. Ibid.
Lincoln, thanking them for the flattering terms of their request,
explained in his reply: "The copies I send you, are as reported and
printed by the respective friends of Senator Douglas and myself at the
time--that is, his by his friends, and mine by mine. It would be an
unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word or a letter in his, and
the changes I have made in mine, you perceive, are verbal only, and
very few in number. I wish the reprint to be precisely as the copies I
send, without any comment whatever."
The enterprise proved a success beyond the most sanguine expectations.
A Columbus firm undertook the publication, itself assuming all
pecuniary risk. Three large editions were sold directly to the public,
without any aid from or any purchase by the committee--the third
edition containing the announcement that up to that date, June 16,
1860, thirty thousand copies had already been circulated.[2]
----------
[1] Partly printed in Hollister, "Life of Colfax," p. 146. We are
indebted to Mrs. Colfax for the full manuscript text of this and other
valuable letters which we have used.
[2] The preface to this third edition contains a letter from Douglas,
alleging that injustice had been done him because, "the original
reports as published in the 'Chicago Times,' although intended to be
fair and just, were necessarily imperfect, and in some respects
erroneous"; charging at the same time that Lincoln's speeches had been
revised, corrected, and improved.[A] To this the publishers replied:
"The speeches of Mr. Lincoln were never 'revised, corrected, or
improved' in the sense you use those words. Remarks by the crowd which
were not responded to, and the reporters' insertions of 'cheers,'
'great applause,' and so forth, which received no answer or comment
from the speaker, were by our direction omitted, as well from Mr.
Lincoln's speeches as yours, as we thought their perpetuation in book
form would be in bad taste, and were in no manner pertinent to, or a
part of, the speech."[B] And the publishers add a list of their
corrections.
[A] Douglas to Follet, Foster & Co., June 9, 1860. Debates, third
edition, preface.
[B] Follet, Foster & Co. to Douglas, June 16, 1860. Ibid.