Free State. Suppose this doctrine of uniformity preached by Mr. Lincoln, that the States should all be Free, or all be Slave, had prevailed, what would have been the result? Of course, the twelve Slaveholding States would have overruled the one Free State, and Slavery would have been fastened by a Constitutional provision on every inch of the American Republic, instead of being left as our Fathers wisely left it, to each State to decide for itself.

“Here I assert that uniformity in the local laws and institutions of the different States is neither possible nor desirable. If uniformity had been adopted when the Government was established, it must inevitably have been the uniformity of Slavery everywhere, or else the uniformity of Negro Citizenship and Negro Equality everywhere." After dwelling for some time on Negro Equality, Negro Citizenship" and the "White-basis" upon which he held this Government was formed, Mr. Douglas concluded his opening, by saying: "I believe that this new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his Party will dissolve the Union, if it succeeds. They are trying to array all the Northern States, in one body, against the South; to excite a Sectional War between the Free States and the Slave States, in order that the one or the other may be driven to the wall."

MR. LINCOLN'S REPLY.

Mr. Lincoln commenced his reply, by referring to the alleged "Senatorship bargain" between himself and Trumbull-which he intimated was a gross and palpable misrepresentation, and "not true;" and, as to the Springfield Resolutions, read by Mr. Douglas as being the platform of the Republican Party in 1854, he said: "I never had anything to do with them, and I think Trumbull never had. Judge Douglas cannot show that either of us ever did have anything to do with them." As to himself he had refused to go into the Springfield Convention, and "went away from Springfield when the Convention was in session, to attend Court, in Tazewell County. It is true," said he, they did place my name, though without authority, upon the committee, and afterward wrote me to attend the meeting of the committee, but I refused to do so, and I never had anything to do with that organization. This is the plain truth about all that matter of the Resolutions."

Declaring there was "no substance whatever" to the charge made by Mr. Douglas of "Lincoln agreeing to Abolitionize and sell out the old Whig Party," in the alleged bargain of 1854 with Trumbull, Mr. Lincoln-after protesting that a man cannot prove a negative," and that he had "a right to claim that if a man says he knows a thing, then he must show how he knows it”—read part of å printed speech made at that very time, at Peoria, to show the openly avowed position he took in the contest of 1854.

In that speech, alluding to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he had said: "I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong; wrong in its direct effect, letting Slavery into Kansas and Nebraska-and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide World, where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of Slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of Slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our Republican example of its just influence in the World-enables the enemies of Free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of Freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open War with the very fundamental principles of Civil Lib erty-criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. *

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"When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the

origin of Slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the Institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing Institution. My first impulse would be to Free all the Slaves, and send them to Liberia-to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. * *What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in Slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon.

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"What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of White people will not. Whether this feeling accords with Justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that Systems of gradual Emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South; when they remind us of their Constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their Fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a Free man into Slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting Slavery to go into our own Free territory, than it would for reviving the African Slave-Trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of Slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter."

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After thus quoting from his speech of 1854, Mr. Lincoln proceeded: "I have reason to know that Judge Douglas knows that I said this. I think he has the answer here to one of the questions he put to me. He has got my answer on the Fugitive Slave Law. * * *This is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of Slavery, and the Black race. This is the whole of it, and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the Negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut-horse.

'I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of Slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right so to do, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the White and the Black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

"I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the White man. I agree, with Judge Douglas, he is not my equal in many respectscertainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.

But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

Alluding to some of the minor topics, Mr. Lincoln denied that he had ever been a grocery-keeper-although he "did work the latter part of one Winter in a little still-house up at the head of a hollow." As to the charge of his opposition, while in Congress, to the Mexican War, he said he had always refused to vote that the War had been righteously begun, but always voted for supplies, etc., to pay the soldiers after it had begun. Then taking up Judge Douglas's criticisms on his Springfield declaration, that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," he asked: "Does the Judge say it can stand? * * If

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he does, then there is a question of veracity, not between him and me, but between the Judge, and an Authority of a somewhat Higher Character."

"When he undertakes to say that because I think this Nation, so far as the question of Slavery is concerned, will all become one thing or all the other, I am in favor of bringing about a dead uniformity in the various States, in all their institutions, he argues erroneously. The great variety of the local institutions in the States, springing from differences in the soil, differences in the face of the country, and in the climate, are bonds of Union. They do not make a house divided against itself,' but they make a house united. If they produce in one section of the Country what is called for by the wants of another section, and this section can supply the wants of the first, they are not matters of discord but bonds of Union, true bonds of Union.

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"But can this question of Slavery be considered as among these varieties in the institutions of the Country? I leave it to you to say whether, in the history of our Government, this institution of Slavery has not always failed to be a bond of Union, and, on the contrary, been an apple of discord, and an element of division in the house. * * Will it not continue an element of division? If so, then I have a right to say that, in regard to this question, the Union is a house divided against itself; and when the Judge reminds me that I have often said to him that the institution of Slavery has existed for eighty years in some States, and yet it does not exist in some others, I agree to the fact, and I account for it by looking at the position in which our Fathers originally placed it—restricting it from the new Territories where it had not gone, and legislating to cut off its source by the abrogation of the Slave-Trade, thus putting the seal of legislation against its spread.

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"The public mind did rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. But lately I think-and in this I charge nothing on the Judge's motives-lately, I think, that he, and those acting with him, have placed that Institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and Nationalization of Slavery. * *Now I believe if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. The crisis would be past, and the Institution might be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the States where it exists, yet it would be going out of existence in the way best for both the Black and the White races."

Some one here asked Mr. Lincoln if he repudiated Popular Sovereignty. Mr. Lincoln replied: “What is Popular Sovereignty? Is it the right of the people to have Slavery or not to have it, as they see fit, in the Territories? I will state-and I have an able man to watch me-my understanding is that Popular Sovereignty, as now applied to the question of Slavery, does allow the people of a Territory to have Slavery if they want to, but does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it. I do not mean that if this vast concourse of people

were in a Territory of the United States, any one of them would be obliged to have a Slave if he did not want one; but I do say that, as I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants Slaves, all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them."

After attending to the Judge's charge that the doctrine of his Springfield speech would produce a Sectional War, and was a new principle, Mr. Lincoln said: "Does the Judge claim that he is working on the plan of the Founders of the Government? I think he says in some of his speeches-indeed, I have one here now-that he saw evidence of a policy to allow Slavery to be South of a certain line, while North of it, it should be excluded, and he saw an indisposition on the part of the Country to stand upon that policy, and therefore he set about studying the subject upon original principles, and upon original principles he got up the Nebraska Bill! I am fighting it, upon these original principles-fighting it in the Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, and Madisonian fashion."

Coming down to the charge of Conspiracy he (Lincoln) had made against Douglas and others-Stephens, Franklin, Roger, and James;" to Douglas's silence on that point; and to his personal flattery of Lincoln; Mr. Lincoln said of the latter: "I was a little taken, for it came from a Great Man. I was not very much accustomed to flattery, and it came the sweeter to me. I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man-and got less of it!"

Mr. Lincoln intimated that Judge Douglas's unfair method of statement-as when asserting that " Lincoln will not enter into the Slave States, but will go to the banks of the Ohio, on this side, and shoot over!" and in the further assertion that "Unless he shall be successful in firing his batteries until he shall have extinguished Slavery in all the States, the Union shall be dissolved"-was "not exactly the way to treat a kind, amiable, intelligent gentleman.""

Touching the charge of Conspiracy, Mr. Lincoln remarked that at Clinton, for the first time, Mr. Douglas had endeavored to meet it, by a plea that he "never had any talk with Judge Taney or the President of the United States with regard to the Dred Scott decision before it was made." Said Mr. Lincoln: "I know the Judge is a Great Man, while I am only a small one, but I feel that I have got him! I demur to that plea. I waive all objections that it was not filed till after default was taken, and demur to it upon the merits. What if Judge Douglas never did talk with Chief Justice Taney and the President, before the Dred Scott decision was made; does it follow that he could not have had as perfect an understanding without talking as with it?

"I am not disposed to stand upon my legal advantage. I am disposed to take his denial as being like an answer in chancery, that he neither had any knowledge, information or belief in the existence of such a Conspiracy. I am disposed to take his answer as being as broad as though he had put it in these words. And now I ask, even if he had done so, have not I a right to prove it on him, and to offer the evidence of more than two witnesses, by whom to prove it; and if the evidence proves the existence of the Conspiracy, does his broad answer denying. all knowledge, information, or belief, disturb the fact? It can only show that he was used by Conspirators, and was not a leader of them.` "Now," continued Mr. Lincoln, "in regard to his reminding me of the moral rule that persons who tell what they do not know to be true, falsify as much as those who knowingly tell falsehoods. I remember the rule, and it must be borne in mind that, in what I have read to you, I do not say that I know such a Conspiracy to exist. To that I reply, I believe it. If the Judge says I do not believe it, then he says what he does not know, and falls within his own rule, that he who asserts a thing which he does not know to be true, falsifies as much as

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he who knowingly tells a falsehood. * If in arraying that evidence, I had stated anything which was false or erroneous, it needed but that Judge Douglas should point it out, and I would have taken it back with all the kindness in the world. * * *But if he will not point out anything erroneous in the evidence, is it not rather for him to show, by a comparison of the evidence, that I have reasoned falsely, than to call the kind, amiable, intelligent gentleman' a liar? If I have reasoned to a false conclusion, it is the vocation of an able debater to show / by argument that I have wandered to an erroneous conclusion.

"I want to ask your attention to a portion of the Nebraska Bill, which Judge Douglas has quoted: 'It being the true intent and meaning of this Act, not to legislate Slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.' Thereupon Judge Douglas and others began to argue in favor of 'Popular Sovereignty-the right of the people to have Slaves if they wanted them, and to exclude Slavery if they did not want them. 'But,' said, in substance, a Senator from Ohio (Mr. Chase, I believe), ‘we more than suspect that you do not mean to allow the people to exclude Slavery if they wish to, and if you do mean it, accept an amendment which I propose expressly authorizing the people to exclude Slavery.' And now I state as a fact, to be taken back if there is any mistake about it, that Judge Douglas, and those acting with him, voted that amendment down.

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"I now think that those men had a real reason for doing so. They know what that reason was. It looks to us, since we have seen the Dred Scott decision pronounced-holding that under the Constitution,' the people cannot exclude Slavery-I say it looks to outsiders, poor, simple, amiable, intelligent gentlemen,' as though the niche was left as a place to put that Dred Scott decision in-a niche which would have been spoiled by adopting the amendment. And now, I say again, if this was not the reason, it will avail the Judge much more to calmly and good-humoredly point out to these people what that other reason was for voting the amendment down, than, swelling himself up, to vociferate that he may be provoked to call somebody a liar.

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Again: there is in that same quotation from the Nebraska Bill, this clause-It being the true intent and meaning of this Act not to legislate Slavery into any Territory or State.' I have always been puzzled to know what business the word 'State' had in that connection. Judge Douglas knows. He put it there. He knows what he put it there for. We outsiders cannot say what he put it there for. The law they were passing was not about States, and was not making provisions for States. What was it placed there for?

"After seeing the Dred Scott decision, which holds that_the people cannot exclude Slavery from a Territory, if another Dred Scott decision shall come, holding that they cannot exclude it from a State, we shall discover that when the word was originally put there, it was in view of something which was to come in due time; we shall see that it was the other half of something. I now say again, if there is any different reason for putting it there, Judge Douglas, in a good-humored way, without calling anybody a liar, can tell what the reason was."

Referring to that part of Mr. Douglas's Clinton speech where he had said "I did not answer the charge (of Conspiracy) before, for the reason that I did not suppose there was a man in America with a heart so corrupt as to believe such a charge could be true," Mr. Lincoln produced, at some length, evidence to show that in a speech of Judge Douglas's in the U. S. Senate, March 22d, 1858, the Judge, in charging that he saw "a fatal blow" was "being struck at the sovereignty of the States of the Union" by that part of the Lecompton Constitution, which asserted "the doctrine that a State has no right to prohibit