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he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation. And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that "he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just;" and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.

We have a Republican State platform, laid down in Springfield in June last, stating our position all the way through the questions before the country. We are now far advanced in this canvass. Judge Douglas and I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth time met face to face in debate, and up to this day I have not found either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican platform or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong. I ask you all to recollect that.

Coming immediately after this are the following quite suggestive and even singularly prophetic words:

Judge Douglas turns away from the platform of principles to the fact that he can find people somewhere who will not allow us to announce those principles. If he had great confidence that our principles were wrong, he would take hold of them and demonstrate them to be wrong. But he does not do so. The only evidence he has of their being wrong is in the fact that there are people who won't allow us to preach them. I ask again, Is that the way to test the soundness of a doctrine? I ask his attention also to the fact that by the rule of nationality he is himself fast becoming sectional. I ask his attention to the fact that his speeches would not go as current now south of the Ohio River as they have formerly gone there. I ask his attention to the fact that he felicitates himself to-day that all the

Democrats of the free States are agreeing with him, while he omits to tell us that the Democrats of any slave State agree with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his own throat.

At Quincy, October 13th, Lincoln went over the chief points of controversy with a calm strength, precision, and force, unsurpassed in any previous effort. The fundamental differences between the respective attitudes of the two combatants were never brought out by him more pointedly, in few words, than in the following passages:

We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is a matter of absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the opinion of all great men who have expressed an opinion upon it that it is a dangerous element. We keep up a controversy in regard to it. That controversy necessarily springs from difference of opinion, and if we can learn exactly can reduce to the lowest elements - what that difference of opinion is, we perhaps shall be better prepared for discussing the different systems of policy that we would propose in regard to that disturbing element. I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong- we think it a moral, a social and a political wrong. We think it a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that extends itself to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with

it as a wrong. We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it. We have a due regard to the actual presence of it amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations thrown about it. . . Where we suppose we have the constitutional right, we restrain ourselves in reference to the actual existence of the institution and the difficulties thrown about it. We also oppose it as an evil so far as it seeks to spread itself. We insist on the policy that shall restrict it to its present limits. We don't suppose that in doing this we violate anything due to the actual presence of the institution, or anything due to the constitutional guarantees thrown around it.

We oppose the Dred Scott decision in a certain way, upon which I ought perhaps to address you a few words. We do not propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the Court, we, as a mob, will decide him to be free. We do not propose that, when any other one, or one thousand, shall be decided by that Court to be slaves, we will in any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled; but we nevertheless do oppose that decision as a political rule, which shall be binding on the voter to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong-which shall be binding on the members of Congress or the President to favor no measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that decision. We do not propose to be bound by it as a political rule in that way, because we think it lays the foundation not merely of enlarging and spreading out what we consider an evil, but it lays the foundation for spreading that evil into the States themselves. We propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

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I will say now that there is a sentiment in the country contrary to me-a sentiment which holds that slavery is not wrong, and therefore it goes for the policy that does not propose dealing with it as a wrong. The leading man- I think I may do my friend Judge Douglas the honor of calling him such-advocating the present Democratic

policy, never himself says it is wrong. He has the high distinction, so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong. Almost everybody else says one or the other, but the Judge never does. . . . When Judge Douglas says that whoever or whatever community wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he can not logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.

Only two days later, October 15th, they met at Alton. Douglas began with his customary treatment of Lincoln's " house-divided speech," without going back "prior to 1854." He made much, as usual, of his great principle of "popular sovereignty" and of his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, which the people of Kansas had voted down some time after this canvass opened. "I will never violate or abandon that doctrine," said Douglas heroically, "if I have to stand alone. I have resisted the blandishments and threats of power on the one side, and seduction on the other, and have stood immovably for that principle, fighting for it when assaulted by Northern mobs or threatened by Southern hostility."

He took special pains to win the support of “oldline Whigs," and sought to turn to the best account the opposition of Lincoln to Henry Clay's nomination in 1848. General Singleton, a supporter of Clay in the Philadelphia Convention of that year, was now actively opposing Lincoln. Said Douglas:

Have you read General Singleton's speech at Jacksonville? You know that General Singleton was for twentyfive years the confidential friend of Henry Clay in Illinois,

and he testified that in 1847, when the Constitutional Convention of this State was in session, the Whig members were invited to a Whig caucus at the house of Mr. Lincoln's brother-in-law, where Mr. Lincoln proposed to throw Henry Clay overboard and take up General Taylor in his place, giving as his reason that if the Whigs did not take up General Taylor, the Democrats would. Singleton testifies that Lincoln, in that speech, urged as another reason for throwing Henry Clay overboard that the Whigs had fought long enough for principle and ought to begin to fight for success. Now, Mr. Lincoln tells you that he is an old-time Clay

Whig!

While there was still no lack of belligerent audacity on the part of Douglas, one can almost certainly detect symptoms of an undercurrent of despondent dread in his mind at this moment. He had already heard Southern responses to avowals drawn from him by the second question of Lincoln's Freeport catechism and by the supplementary fifth question at Jonesboro. Though, with the advantages secured by an unequal apportionment and by the number of Democratic Senators holding over, he might feel reasonably secure of retaining his present place, he could not but have seriously laid to heart the monition his opponent had given him at Galesburg.

Notably enough, in his impressive speech at Alton Lincoln used these words: "Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out, so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably, too. There will be no war, no violence. It will be placed again where the wisest and best men of the world placed it."

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