Facsimile of First Page of Mrs. Lincoln's Letter of Acknowledgment of the Medal Presented by the Citizens of France

for yourselves and for those schien you represent, my most grateful. acknowledgments

a new life in the Southern States. It was first regretted, then excused, then justified, finally glorified. Other causes tended to promote radical differences between North and South, but they would easily have been overcome had it not been that slavery existed in one section and not in another. For a while a line was drawn across the continent, and an agreement was reached, that south of that line, slavery should never be interfered with, north of that line the territory should remain forever free. The abolition of this Compromise in 1854 opened Northern territory to slavery and threw the whole country into a ferment of passion and panic. In the light of subsequent history, arguments do not seem even specious now that seemed forceful then. They were such as these: Slave labor is necessary to cotton, and cotton is necessary to the world. Slaves have been made property, and interference with slavery is a violation of vested rights. Slavery is recognized by the Constitution; to interfere with slavery is to violate a solemn compact and to rend asunder the most sacred document ever written by human hands. Slavery is justified by patriarchal example, by Old Testament laws, and by Noah's curse of Canaan and his descendants; to demand its abolition is to deny the Bible and attack the foundations of religion. The continued agitation of the slave question destroys business prosperity, paralyzes industry, threatens the destruction of the Union, the last hope of democracy upon the earth; against such disastrous consequences the imaginary welfare of three million black men is not for an instant to be weighed. Thus economics, the rights of property, the Constitution of the United States, the Old Testament laws, the spirit of patriotism, reenforced by the inertia miscalled conservatism, were all combined in the endeavor to prohibit agitation of the slavery question. Eloquently did Lincoln sum up the condition of the negro in a speech delivered in Springfield a year before his nomination to the United States Senate:

"All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his

prison-house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key-the key in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

In the confused and vehement conflict of passions and opinions which only the pen of a Carlyle would be adequate to portray, there emerged two parties, both of which justified the abolition of the Missouri Compromise and the opening of Northern territory to the incursion of slavery. One of these parties in the Presidential election of 1860 was represented by Breckinridge, the other by Douglas. The first demanded the constitutional right to carry their slaves as property into every State in the Union. Robert Toombs, of Georgia, boasted that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument. The famous Dred Scott decision, that a slave was not converted into a free man by being carried into free territory, gave apparent, if not real support to the constitutional argument of the Breckinridge wing. The other party did not claim that slavery must go, but only that it might go, into Northern territory. As a compromise between North and South, Stephen A. Douglas invented the doctrine-which his friends called "popular sovereignty" and his enemies "squatter sovereignty"-the doctrine that the people of any State might determine whether it should be a free or a slave State, when they framed its Constitution. To both these doctrines Lincoln brought the plumb-line of practical righteousness. His answer to the Dred Scott decision was:

"It is singular that the courts would hold that a man never lost his right to his property that had been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to himself if he was stolen."

His answer to popular sovereignty was equally terse and equally unanswerable:

"The doctrine of self-government is right-absolutely and eternally right. . . . When the white man governs himself, that is selfgovernment; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism."

And his answer to all the defences of slavery, economic, philosophic, humanitarian, and religious, was summed up in an appeal to consciousness that might have been derived from Darwin's "Emotions in Animals and Man," if that book had then been written. He says:

"The ant who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest will fiercely defend the fruit of his labor against whatever robber assails him. So plain is it that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master does know that he has been wronged. So plain is it that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way; for, although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who writes to tell the good of it, being a slave himself."

And yet Lincoln was not an Abolitionist. Not because he was less just, but because he was more just; because he recognized rights which the Abolitionists did not recognize, and insisted upon duties which they ignored. The Abolitionists declared that slave-holders, slave-traders, and slave-drivers "are a race of monsters unparalleled in their assumption of power and their despotic cruelty." Never did Lincoln utter a word of bitterness or hate against the slave-owner. "I think I have," he said, "no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up." The Abolitionists declared that the existing Constitution of the United States "is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." Lincoln believed in that Constitution, honored the men who framed it, solemnly swore to support it, and laid down his life in maintaining that solemn oath. The Abolitionists demanded "immediate, unconditional emancipation." One of Lincoln's first acts in going to Congress was to propose a Bill for the gradual emancipation of slavery in the District of Columbia, with compensation to