Chapter VIII

The Nation Chooses

Lectures on Discoveries-Cooper Institute Speech-Becomes a Presidential Candidate-The Chicago Convention-The Platform— The Campaign of 1860.

THE struggle for the Senatorship, with its hundred days of summer heat, and constant travel, and more than daily speech-making, was enough to test the strength of any man. Douglas had been already over-strained, and was now exhausted, and Lincoln was tired, though not broken by it. If he had ever had any tendency to consumption, as he supposed, we can only surmise that the outdoor life with all its mental and physical movement suited him well. His heroic power of endurance was a constant astonishment to his friends.

The difficulty he felt was not that of nervous exhaustion, but rather, that of poverty. He could hardly now afford to continue the great work for America to which he had put his hand. He had lost the opportunity offered by the emoluments of a Senator, and half a year of professional earnings, beside the sums which he had contributed toward the expenses of the canvass. For awhile he contemplated making good this financial deficiency by popular lectures; and prepared one, at least, under the title of

Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements, apparently delivering it for the first time on Washington's birthday, 1859.

The lecture opened with a shrewd and humorous portrait of Douglas's "Young America," possessed by a Platonic "longing after" territory,—and a "perfect rage for the 'new'; particularly new men for office, and the new earth mentioned in the Revelations, in which, being no more sea, there must be about three times as much land as in the present. He is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land is not selfish," quoth Lincoln, "but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom," with much more in the same excellent vein of political fooling, gradually giving place to a more serious view of his subject. He was however dissatisfied with his success as a lecturer, and after a few attempts abandoned the enterprise.

The summer was principally devoted to law, to careful watching over the Republican organisation in Illinois, and to refusing the invitations for speechmaking which now came to him from all parts of the Northern States, and to which it was impossible for him to accede. He had spoken at Chicago in March, and in April had written that, although flattered by the suggestion, he regarded himself as unfit for the Presidency, and deprecated any concerted effort to obtain a nomination. Later in the year he professed his preference for a full six-years' term in the Senate to one, of four years, in the White House.

He was continually urging Republicans not to stultify their main position, their assertion of the evil of slavery, in order to win support: nor to allow

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themselves to be separated by local dissensions. still regarded Douglas as the most dangerous, because the most insidious, enemy of liberty; and when the latter took a part in the autumn campaign in Ohio, Lincoln followed and replied to him with effect both at Columbus and Cincinnati.

In his speech at the latter place, he defined his position as follows, addressing himself especially to the men across the river, the men of his native State: "I say, then, in the first place, to the Kentuckians, that I am what they call, as I understand it, a 'Black Republican.' I think slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.”

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Probably the most striking passage was that in which he spoke of the relations between Capital and Labour then existing in the West; but singularly enough it is only partly rendered in the report. seems, however, to have repeated it in his address before the Wisconsin Agricultural Society at their Annual Fair, a fortnight later, when he implicitly upheld the doctrine that Labour, so far from being dependent upon Capital, is the source of all Capital, independent of it, and greatly its superior; and that Labour, Education and Capital are best combined in one person that of the free, intelligent, independent labourer, the hope and stock of America. For the rest, he seems still to have remained an advocate of Clay's so-called American system and its protective tariffs, arguing against the industrial wastefulness of long distance carriage, and advocating more thorough culture and local development.

Early in December he accepted an invitation to visit north-eastern Kansas, where the Republicans still leant towards Douglas. Here he again exposed the "ambuscade" of "popular sovereignty."

But even while Lincoln was thus arguing against Douglas's nostrum, the attention of his hearers was rivetted upon Virginia. For there John Brown, a wellknown figure in Kansas through the days of civil strife, was being executed for treason, conspiracy, and murder, in consequence of his raid upon the Government Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and his attempt to raise the negroes of the State in revolt against their masters. Lincoln referred at the time to this event in the following words:

"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a State. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. avail him nothing that he might think himself right."

It could

These sentences were spoken as a warning to the slavery party, which was threatening "violence, bloodshed, and treason" against the nation.

Brown's raid had taken place in October. In the same month Lincoln received an unexpected invitation to lecture in Brooklyn. He accepted; and fully realising the importance of this opportunity, laboured assiduously at his address, which was delivered on 27th February at the Cooper Institute, New York. Douglas and other Democrats had attempted to prove that the raid was the logical and inevitable outcome of Republican doctrines. In this speech Lincoln emphatically repeated the assertion made in Kansas, and dissociated the whole policy of the raid from that

of the Republican party. The raid was described as the work of a solitary enthusiast brooding "over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them." It was an attempt to assassinate the slave-power. Politically, Lincoln repudiated John Brown. He was not a Republican; he was not a Constitutionalist. For better and worse, he was a rebel, a fanatical exponent of the abolitionism which took for its cry, "No union with slave-owners," and described the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." Lincoln, I need hardly add, had always regarded this as false political doctrine.

Lincoln's Cooper Institute Speech is generally counted among his ablest addresses, but naturally it traverses much of the ground already made familiar through the joint debates. He adopted as his text the declaration of Douglas that the Fathers of the Constitution understood the large political problem of American Slavery at least as well or even better than his own contemporaries. He proceeded, by a close and careful argument, to define their position, and to prove that they not only held that Congress had the constitutional power to control all extension of slavery into the Territories, but that they themselves had used that power to restrict the area of slavery. He closed with a vigorous protest against the aggressions of the slavery party, who would never be contented while a single man condemned their favoured institution as morally evil; and an appeal to all who did so regard it, fearlessly and effectively to do their duty, in the faith that "right makes might."

The speech owes something of its acknowledged