ing temper of the time was refused consideration by congress. He was not a candidate for re-election, but for the first and only time in his life he applied for an executive appointment, the commissionership of the general land-office. The place was given to another man, but President Taylor's administration offered Mr. Lincoln the governorship of the territory of Oregon, which he declined.

Mr. Lincoln had by this time become the most influential exponent of the principles of the Whig party in Illinois, and his services were in request in every campaign. After his return from congress he devoted himself with great assiduity and success to the practice of law, and speedily gained a commanding position at the bar. As he says himself, he was losing his interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him again. The profound agitation of the question of slavery, which in 1854 followed the repeal of the Missouri compromise, awakened all the energies of Lincoln's nature. He regarded this act, in which Senator Douglas was the most prominent agent of the reactionary party, as a gross breach of faith, and began at once a series of earnest political discussions which immediately placed him at the head of the party that, not only in Illinois but throughout the west, was speedily formed to protest against and oppose the throwing open of the territories to the encroachments of slavery. The legislature

elected in Illinois in the heat of this discussion contained a majority of members opposed to the policy of Douglas. The duty of selecting a senator in place of Gen. Shields, whose term was closing, devolved upon this legislature, and Mr. Lincoln was the unanimous choice of the Whig members. But they did not command a clear majority of the legislature. There were four members of Democratic antecedents who, while they were ardently opposed to the extension of slavery, were not willing to cast their votes for a Whig candidate, and adhered tenaciously through several ballots to Lyman Trumbull, a Democrat of their own way of thinking. Lincoln, fearing that this dissension among the anti-slavery men might result in the elec

tion of a supporter of Douglas, urged his friends to go over in a body to the support of Trumbull, and his influence was sufficient to accomplish this result. Trumbull was elected, and for many years served the Republican cause in the senate with ability and zeal.

As soon as the Republican party became fully organized in the nation, embracing in its ranks the anti-slavery members of the old Whig and Democratic parties, Mr. Lincoln, by general consent, took his place at the head of the party in Illinois; and when, in 1858, Senator Douglas sought a re-election to the senate, the Republicans with one voice selected Mr. Lincoln as his antagonist. He had already made several speeches of remarkable eloquence and power against the pro-slavery reaction of which the Nebraska bill was the significant beginning, and when Mr. Douglas returned to Illinois to begin his canvass for the senate, he was challenged by Mr. Lincoln to a series of joint discussions. The challenge was accepted, and the most remarkable oratorical combat the state has ever witnessed took place between them during the summer. Mr. Douglas defended his thesis of non-intervention with slavery in the territories (the doctrine known as "popular sovereignty," and derided as "squatter sovereignty ") with remarkable adroitness and energy. The ground that Mr. Lincoln took was higher and bolder than had yet been assumed by any American statesman of his time. In the brief and sententious speech in which he accepted the championship of his party, before the Republican convention of 16 June, 1858, he uttered the following pregnant and prophetic words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south." This bold utterance excited the fears of his timid friends, and laid him open to the hackneyed and conventional attacks of the supporters of slavery; but throughout the contest, while he did not for an instant lower this lofty tone of op

position to slavery and hope of its extinction, he refused to be crowded by the fears of his friends or the denunciations of his enemies away from the strictly constitutional ground upon which his opposition was made. The debates between him and Senator Douglas aroused extraordinary interest throughout the state and the country. The men were perhaps equally matched in oratorical ability and adroitness in debate, but Lincoln's superiority in moral insight, and especially in far-seeing political sagacity, soon became apparent. The most important and significant of the debates was that which took place at Freeport. Mr. Douglas had previously asked Mr. Lincoln a series. of questions intended to embarrass him, which Lincoln without the slightest reserve answered by a categorical yes or no. At Freeport, Lincoln, taking his turn, inquired of Douglas whether the people of a territory could in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution. By his reply, intimating that slavery might be excluded by unfriendly territorial legislation, Douglas gained a momentary advantage in the anti-slavery region in which he spoke, but dealt a fatal blow to his popularity in the south, the result of which was seen two years afterward at the Charleston convention. The ground assumed by Senator Douglas was, in fact, utterly untenable, and Lincoln showed this in one of his terse "Judge Douglas holds," he said, "that a thing may lawfully be driven away from a place where it has a lawful right to go."

sentences.

This debate established the reputation of Mr. Lincoln as one of the leading orators of the Republican party of the Union, and a speech that he delivered at Cooper Institute, in New York, on 27 Feb., 1860, in which he showed that the unbroken record of the founders of the republic was in favor of the restriction of slavery and against its extension, widened and confirmed his reputation; so that when the Republican convention came together in Chicago in May, 1860, he was nominated for the presidency on the third ballot, over William H. Seward, who was his principal competitor. The Democratic convention, which met in Charleston, S. C., broke up after numerous fruitless ballotings, and divided into two sections. The southern half, unable to trust Mr. Douglas with the interests of slavery after his Freeport speech, first adjourned to

Richmond, but again joined the other half at Baltimore, where a second disruption took place, after which the southern half nominated John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, and the northern portion nominated Mr. Douglas. John Bell, of Tennessee, was nominated by the so-called Constitutional Union party. Lincoln, therefore, supported by the entire anti-slavery sentiment of the north, gained an easy victory over the three other parties. The election took place on 6 Nov., and when the electoral college cast their votes Lincoln was found to have 180, Breckinridge 72, Bell 39, and Douglas 12. The popular vote stood for Lincoln, 1,866,462; for Douglas, 1,375,157; for Breckinridge, 847,953; for Bell, 590,631.

The extreme partisans of slavery had not even waited for the election of Lincoln, to begin their preparations for an insurrection, and as soon as the result was declared a movement for separation was begun in South Carolina, and it carried along with her the states of Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. A provisional government, styled the "Confederate States of America," of which Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was made president, was promptly organized, and seized, with few exceptions, all the posts, arsenals, and public property of the United States within their limits. Confronted by this extraordinary crisis, Mr. Lincoln kept his own counsel, and made no public expression of his intentions or his policy until he was inaugurated on 4 March, 1861.

He called about him a cabinet of the most prominent members of the anti-slavery parties of the nation, giving no preference to any special faction. His secretary of state was William H. Seward, of New York, who had been his principal rival for the nomination, and whose eminence and abilities designated him as the leading member of the administration; the secretary of the treasury was Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, whose pre-eminence in the west was as unquestioned as Seward's in the east; of war, Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, the most influential politician of that state; of the navy, Gideon Welles, of Connecticut; of the interior, Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana; the border slave-states were represented in the government by Edward Bates, of Missouri, attorney-general, and Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, postmaster-general-both of them men of great distinction of character and high standing as lawyers. Seward, Smith, and Bates were of Whig antecedents; all the

rest of Democratic. The cabinet underwent, in the course of Mr. Lincoln's term, the following modifications: Sec. Chase, after a brilliant administration of the finances, resigned in 1864 from personal reasons, and was succeeded by William P. Fessenden, of Maine; Sec. Cameron left the war department at the close of the year 1861, and was appointed minister to Russia, and his place was taken by Edwin M. Stanton, a war Democrat of singular energy and vigor, and equal ability and devotion; Sec. Smith, accepting a judgeship, gave way to John P. Usher,

of Indiana; Attorney-General Bates resigned in the last year of the administration, and was succeeded by James Speed, of Kentucky; and Postmaster-General Blair about the same time gave way to William Dennison, of Ohio.

In his inaugural address President Lincoln treated the acts of secession as a nullity. He declared the Union perpetual and inviolate, and announced with. perfect firmness, though with the greatest moderation of speech and feeling, the intention of the government to maintain its authority and to hold the places under its jurisdiction. He made an elaborate and unanswerable

argument against the legality as well as the justice of secession, and further showed, with convincing clearness, that peaceful secession was impossible. "Can aliens make treaties," he said, "easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war; you cannot fight always, and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you." He pleaded for peace in a strain of equal tenderness and dignity, and in closing he said: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will