ment," writes Mrs. Judd, "saying, 'Lincoln has lost the case for us. The admissions he made in regard to the currents in the Mississippi at Rock Island and Moline will convince the court that a bridge at that point will always be a serious and constant detriment to navigation on the river.' 'Wait until you hear the conclusion of his speech,' replied Mr. Judd; 'you will find his admission is a strong point instead of a weak one, and on it he will found a strong argument that will satisfy you.'" And as it proved, Mr. Judd was right.

The few cases briefly outlined here show something of the range of Lincoln's legal work. They show that not only his friends like Hannah Armstrong believed in his power with a jury, but that great corporations like the Illinois Central Railroad were willing to trust their affairs in his hands; that he was not only a "jury lawyer," as has been often stated, but trusted when it came to questions of law pure and simple. If this study of his cases were continued, it would only be to accumulate evidence to prove that Lincoln was considered by his contemporaries one of the best lawyers of Illinois.

It is worth notice, too, that he made his reputation as a lawyer and tried his greatest cases before his debate with Douglas gave him a national reputation. It was in 1855 that the Illinois Central engaged him first as counsel; in 1855 that he went to Cincinnati on the McCormick case; in 1857 that he tried the Rock Island Bridge case. Thus his place was won purely on his legal ability unaided by political prestige. His success came, too, in middle life. Lincoln was forty years old in 1849, when he abandoned politics definitely, as he thought, for the law. He tried his greatest cases when he was from forty-five to forty-eight.

CHAPTER XVII

LINCOLN RE-ENTERS POLITICS

FROM 1849 to 1854 Abraham Lincoln gave almost his entire time to his profession. Politics received from him only the attention which any public spirited citizen without personal ambition should give. He kept close watch upon Federal, State and local affairs. He was active in the efforts made in Illinois in 1851 to secure a more thorough party organization. In 1852 he was on the Scott electoral ticket and did some canvassing. But this was all. He was yearly becoming more absorbed in his legal work, losing more and more of his old inclination for politics, when in May, 1854, the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before in all his life. The Missouri Compromise was the second in that series of noble provisions for making new territory free territory, which libertyloving men have wrested from the United States Congress, whenever the thirst for expansion has seized this country. The first of these was the "Ordinance of 1787," prohibiting slavery in all the great Northwest Territory. The second the Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, was the result of a struggle to keep the Louisiana Purchase free. It provided that Missouri might come in as a slave State if slavery was never allowed north of 36° 30′ north latitude. The next great expansion of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase resulted from the annexation of Texas, and of the territory acquired by the Mexican War. The North was determined that this new territory should be

free. The South wanted it for slaves. The struggle between them threatened the Union for a time, but it was adjusted by the compromise of 1850, in which, according to Mr. Lincoln's summing up, "the South got their new fugitive-slave law, and the North got California (by far the best part of our acquisition from Mexico) as a free State. The South got a provision that New Mexico and Utah, when admitted as States, may come in with or without slavery, as they may then choose; and the North got the slave-trade abolished in the District of Columbia. The North got the western boundary of Texas thrown farther back eastward than the South desired; but, in turn, they gave Texas ten millions of dollars with which to pay her old debts."

For three years matters were quiet. Then Nebraska sought territorial organization. Now by the Missouri Compromise slavery was forbidden in that section of the Union, but in spite of this fact Stephen A. Douglas, then a member of the Senate of the United States, introduced a bill to give Nebraska and Kansas the desired government, to which later he added an amendment repealing the Missouri Compromise and permitting the people who should settle in the new territories to reject or establish slavery as they should see fit. It was the passage of this bill which brought Abraham Lincoln from the court room to the stump. His friend Richard Yates was running for re-election to Congress. Lincoln began to speak for him, but in accepting invitations he stipulated that it should be against the Kansas-Nebraska bill that he talk. His earnestness surprised his friends. Lincoln was coming back into politics, they said, and when Douglas, the author of the repeal, was announced to speak in Springfield in October of 1854, they called on Lincoln to meet him.

Douglas was having a serious struggle to reconcile his

Illinois constituency. All the free sentiment of the State had been bitterly aroused by his part in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and when he first returned to Illinois it looked as if he would not be given even a hearing. Indeed, when he first attempted to speak in Chicago, September 1, he was hooted from the platform. With every day in the State, however, he won back his friends, so great was his power over men, and he was beginning to arouse something of his old enthusiasm when he went to Springfield to speak at the annual State Fair. There was a great crowd present from all parts of the State, and Douglas spoke for three hours. When he closed it was announced that Lincoln would answer him the next day. Lincoln's friends expected him to do well in his reply, but his speech was a surprise even to those who knew him best. It was profound, finished, vigorous, eloquent. When had he mastered the history of the slavery question so completely? they asked each other. "The anti-Nebraska speech of Mr. Lincoln," said the Springfield "Journal" the next day, was the profoundest, in our opinion that he has made in his whole life. He felt upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice swelled within, and came near stifling utterance. He quivered with emotion. The whole house was as still as death. He attacked the Nebraska bill with unusual warmth and energy; and all felt that a man of strength was its enemy, and that he intended to blast it if he could by strong and manly efforts. He was most successful, and the house approved the glorious triumph of truth by loud and continued huzzas."

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The vigor and earnestness of Lincoln's speech aroused the crowd to such enthusiasm that Senator Douglas felt obliged to reply to him the next day. These speeches of October 3, 4 and 5, 1854, form really the first of the series of Lincoln

Douglas Debates. They proved conclusively to the antiNebraska politicians in Illinois that Lincoln was to be their leader in the fight they had begun against the extension of slavery

Although the speech of October 4 was not preserved, we know from Paul Selby, at that time editor of an independent paper in Jacksonville, Illinois, which had been working hard against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, that Lincoln's speech at Springfield was practically the same as one delivered twelve days later at Peoria in reply to Douglas. Of this latter a full report was preserved.

In his reply at Peoria, Lincoln began by a brief but sufficient résumé of the efforts of the North to apply the Declaration of Independence to all new territory which it acquired, and failing in that to provide for the sake of peace a series of compromises reserving as much territory as possible to freedom. He showed that the Kansas-Nebraska bill was a direct violation of one of the greatest of these solemn compromises. This he declared was "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 men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest."