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as well for me to return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends, and to keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself; so that, if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to enter myself as a competitor of others, or to authorize any one so to enter me, is what my word and honor forbid."

Judge Stephen T. Logan, his late law partner, was nominated for the place, and heartily supported not only by Mr. Lincoln, but also by the Whigs of the district. By this time, however, the politics of the district had undergone a change by reason of the heavy emigration to Illinois at that period, and Judge Logan was defeated.

Mr. Lincoln's strict and sensitive adherence to his promises now brought him a disappointment which was one of those blessings in disguise so commonly deplored for the time being by the wisest and best. A number of the Western members of Congress had joined in a recommendation to President-elect Taylor to give Colonel E. D. Baker a place in his cabinet, a reward he richly deserved for his talents, his party service, and the military honor he had won in the Mexican War. When this application bore no fruit, the Whigs of Illinois, expecting at least some encouragement from the new administration, laid claim to a bureau appointment, that of Commissioner of the General Land Office, in the new Department of the Interior, recently established.

"I believe that, so far as the Whigs in Congress are concerned," wrote Lincoln to Speed twelve days before

Taylor's inauguration, "I could have the General Land Office almost by common consent; but then Sweet and Don Morrison and Browning and Cyrus Edwards all want it, and what is worse, while I think I could easily take it myself, I fear I shall have trouble to get it for any other man in Illinois."

Unselfishly yielding his own chances, he tried to induce the four Illinois candidates to come to a mutual agreement in favor of one of their own number. They were so tardy in settling their differences as to excite his impatience, and he wrote to a Washington friend:

"I learn from Washington that a man by the name of Butterfield will probably be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office. This ought not to be. Some kind friends think I ought to be an applicant, but I am for Mr. Edwards. Try to defeat Butterfield, and, in doing so, use Mr. Edwards, J. L. D. Morrison, or myself, whichever you can to best advantage."

As the situation grew persistently worse, Mr. Lincoln at length, about the first of June, himself became a formal applicant. But the delay resulting from his devotion to his friends had dissipated his chances. Butterfield received the appointment, and the defeat was aggravated when, a few months later, his unrelenting spirit of justice and fairness impelled him to write a letter defending Butterfield and the Secretary of the Interior from an attack by one of Lincoln's warm personal but indiscreet friends in the Illinois legislature. It was, however, a fortunate escape. In the four succeeding years Mr. Lincoln qualified himself for better things than the monotonous drudgery of an administrative bureau at Washington. It is probable that this defeat also enabled him more easily to pass by another

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temptation. The Taylor administration, realizing its ingratitude, at length, in September, offered him the governorship of the recently organized territory of Oregon; but he replied:

"On as much reflection as I have had time to give the subject, I cannot consent to accept it."

VII

Repeal of the Missouri Compromise-State Fair Debate -Peoria Debate-Trumbull Elected-Letter to Robinson-The Know-Nothings-Decatur Meeting-Bloomington Convention-Philadelphia Convention—Lincoln's Vote for Vice-President-Frémont and Dayton -Lincoln's Campaign Speeches-Chicago Banquet Speech

AFT

FTER the expiration of his term in Congress Mr. Lincoln applied himself with unremitting assiduity to the practice of law, which the growth of the State in population, and the widening of his acquaintanceship, no less than his own growth in experience and legal acumen, rendered ever more important and absorbing.

"In 1854," he writes, "his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before."

Not alone Mr. Lincoln, but, indeed, the whole nation, was so aroused-the Democratic party, and nearly the entire South, to force the passage of that repeal through Congress, and an alarmed majority, including even a considerable minority of the Democratic party in the North, to resist its passage.

Mr. Lincoln, of course, shared the general indignation of Northern sentiment that the whole of the remaining Louisiana Territory, out of which six States, and the greater part of two more, have since been

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organized and admitted to the Union, should be opened to the possible extension of slavery. But two points served specially to enlist his energy in the controversy. One was personal, in that Senator Douglas of Illinois, by whom the repeal was championed, and whose influence as a free-State senator and powerful Democratic leader alone made the repeal possible, had been his personal antagonist in Illinois politics for almost twenty years. The other was moral, in that the new question involved the elemental principles of the American government, the fundamental maxim of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. His intuitive logic needed no demonstration that bank, tariff, internal improvements, the Mexican War, and their related incidents, were questions of passing expediency; but that this sudden reaction, needlessly grafted upon a routine statute to organize a new territory, was the unmistakable herald of a coming struggle which might transform republican institutions.

It was in January, 1854, that the accidents of a Senate debate threw into Congress and upon the country the firebrand of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The repeal was not consummated till the month of May; and from May until the autumn elections the flame of acrimonious discussion ran over the whole country like a wild fire. There is no record that Mr. Lincoln took any public part in the discussion until the month of September, but it is very clear that he not only carefully watched its progress, but that he studied its phases of development, its historical origins, and its legal bearings with close industry, and gathered from party literature and legislative documents a harvest of substantial facts and data, rather than the wordy campaign phrases and explosive epithets with which more impulsive students and speakers were content