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honor the memory of the man upon whom fell the leading part in that great transformation.

I had the good fortune to be one of the delegates from Pike county in the Bloomington convention of 1856, and to hear the inspiring address delivered by Abraham Lincoln at its close, which held the audience in such rapt attention that the reporters dropped their pencils and forgot their work. Never did nobler seed fall upon more fruitful soil than his argument and exhortation upon the minds and hearts of his enthusiastic listeners. The remembrance of that interesting occasion calls up very vividly many other momentous and related events it was my priviledge to witness during the stirring years that succeeded. In the Representatives' Hall at Springfield I heard him deliver the famous address in which he quoted the scriptural maxim that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," and declared his belief that the Union could not permanently endure, half slave and half free. In the Wigwam at Chicago I heard the roll call and the thunderous applause that decided and greeted his first nomination for president. On the east portico of the Capitol at Washington I heard him read his first inaugural, in which he announced the Union to be perpetual. In the White House I saw him sign the final Proclamation of Emancipation. On the Battlefield of Gettysburg I heard him pronounce his immortal Gettysburg address. I saw him sign the joint resolution of congress which authorized the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. And once more on the east portico, I heard from his lips the sublime words of the second inaugural.

These leading incidents are but a few of the monumental mile stones that measure the career of this wonderful man. Between them, through a period of ten years, runs an easily traceable chain of cause and effect. But the chain of cause and effect, which is so clear to the readers of history forty-four years after the events, could not be seen by those of us who sat in the Bloomington convention. It was hidden by that impenetrable veil which the future hangs between every sunset and

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its succeeding sunrise; between the old year and the new; between the century that ends, and the century to come.

We who heard Lincoln's convention speech of 1856 could not know-neither could he himself know-that it would be followed by his House-divided-against-itself speech in 1858; that the Lincoln-Douglas debates would elect him president in 1860, and that the resulting Civil War would usher in the Thirteenth Amendment. The most that the Bloomington resolutions dared to ask for was the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, the prohibition of slavery in all the territories, and the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state. Such was the bewilderment of public thought-such the party antagonisms of the past-such the uncertainties of the future, that the Bloomington convention only called itself an Anti-Nebraska organization, and even the Philadelphia convention which three weeks later nominated Fremont, did not yet adopt the Republican name, either in its call or in its platform.

Unfortunately the fifty speeches which Lincoln made in the Fremont campaign were never put in print, and we therefore have no record of his observations on the weather-signs of approaching politics, except that the election of Governor Bissell rendered Illinois a prospective Republican state. It required two years more to afford a clear outlook on the political situation which was developed, first in the election of Buchanan, second in the reactionary dictum of the Dred-Scott decision, and third in the astounding contrivances of the Lecompton Constitution. By these events, the slavery question revealed itself in entirely new aspects, and Lincoln was the first and only man in the United States who correctly discerned and accurately defined its grave portents. In his house-dividedagainst-itself speech he laid down what was at once the most radical and the most conservative programme of action outlined by any American statesman, and which, though not embodied in the phraseology of the republican platform, became practically the basis of thought, of discussion, and of decision by the whole body of American voters. Territorial prohibition or

popular sovereignty, the admission of Kansas, or the senate balance of power, were no longer vital problems. All the previous four years' discussion, oral and printed, had become empty breath and waste paper. The whole field of conflict was changed. The fight was no longer to be waged in the halls of congress, or on the plains of Kansas. There remained but two real and authoritative contestants, one, the voice of the supreme court, the other, the voice of the people. Let the supreme court decide that the states were powerless to prohibit slavery, and let public opinion accept the decision, and controversy was necessarily at an end, and the nationalization of slavery complete and final.

Against this consummation there was but one effectual safeguard; an appeal must be taken from the dictum of the supreme court to the conscience of the nation. Not alone must the spread of slavery be arrested, but the public mind must be restored to the belief that the institution was in course of ultimate extinction. That was the starting point of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which the discussion ranged over a multitude of collateral points, with a skill in forensic battle that has rarely, if ever, been equaled. But the very pith and marrow of the debate was exceedingly simple. Douglas devoted all his ability to show that if the people of a territory or state wanted slavery, they had a right to have it. Lincoln, on the contrary, little by little forced the discussion to a demonstration that even if they did want slavery, they had no right to have it, because slavery was wrong, and no people have a right to do wrong. Upon this issue, though Douglas gained the senatorship, Lincoln carried the popular vote, and made Illinois a factor in the coming presidential campaign.

This, however, was only a local result. As a matter of fact, these Lincoln-Douglas debates were widely printed and read in the newspapers, and absorbed public attention in every state in the Union to an extent never before accorded a merely state election. The larger question of slavery, so unexpectedly renewed in 1854, was gradually reaching its climax, and the short axiomatic definitions with which Lincoln lifted the ar

gument from the level of political expediency to one of moral resposibility were eagerly accepted and remembered in the free states.

The debate indeed did not end with the senatorial contest. The doctrine of "unfriendly legislation," to which Lincoln's searching questions had driven Douglas, created a schism in the Democratic party, and the agitation went on in various forms, until Lincoln, in his Cooper Institute speech in New York once more clearly defined the pending issue:

"If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we (the north) cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they, (the south) cannot justly insist upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national territories, and to overrun us here in these free states? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. * Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare do our duty as we understand it."

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It was this clear analysis of the pending quarrel between the north and the south; this candid assertion that slavery is wrong; this firm declaration that public opinion must put it in course of ultimate extinction, which caused the nomination of Lincoln for president at Chicago, and induced the people of the free states to elect him.

In the decisive majorities shown by that election the southern leaders beheld the final verdict of public opinion. No matter what compromises they might break; no matter by what force or fraud they might restore their senatorial balance of

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