THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES.

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(See HENRY CLAY.) The first great battle between these two giants of debate took place at the State Fair at Springfield, in October of 1854. Douglas made, on Tuesday, a great speech to an unprecedented concourse of people, and was the lion of the hour. The next day Lincoln replied, and his effort was such as to surprise both his friends and his opponents. It was probably the first occasion on which he reached his full power. In the words of a friendly editor: "The Nebraska bill was shivered, and like a tree of the forest was torn and rent asunder by the hot bolts of truth. . . . At the conclusion of this speech every man and child felt that it was unanswerable."

It was arranged that Lincoln was to follow Douglas and reply to his speeches, and the two met in joint debate at Peoria, after which Douglas proposed that they should both abandon the debate, agreeing to cancel his appointments and make no more speeches during that campaign, if Lincoln would do the same. Lincoln somewhat weakly agreed to this proposition, and the next day, when Douglas pleaded hoarseness as an excuse, he gallantly refused to take advantage of "Judge Douglas's indisposition." He faithfully kept to the agreement, though Douglas allowed himself, on one occasion, to be tempted into violating it.

THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS.

But it was the campaign of 1858 which made Lincoln famous, which fully demonstrated his powers, and which prepared him for the presidency. Douglas was immensely popular. His advocacy of territorial expansion appealed to the patriotism of the young and ardent; his doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty" was well calculated to mislead the shallow thinker; and his power in debate had given him the name of "the Little Giant." True, the "Dred Scott decision "had made it difficult to hold his Northern constituency to the toleration of any attitude which could be construed as favoring the South,* but his opposition to the Lecompton pro-slavery constitution, on the ground that it had never been fairly voted upon by the people of Kansas, not only maintained the loyalty of his par

*The Dred Scott decision was delivered by Chief Justice Taney, of the United States Supreme Court, on March 6, 1857, immediately after the inauguration of President Buchanan. Dred Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master from Missouri to Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery was illegal, and had lived there for some years. He was then taken back to Missouri, and having been whipped, he brought suit against his master for assault, pleading that he was made free by being taken into a free State, where slavery was illegal. The Missouri Circuit Court decided in his favor; but the case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which decided that the Missouri Compromise, limiting the area of slavery, was unconstitutional, and that therefore slaveholders could enter any free State with slaves and hold them there as property; that negroes, being incapable of becoming citizens, had no standing in court, and could not maintain a suit for any purpose. As this decision overthrew all barriers against the extension of slavery, even to the free States, and declared that the negro had no rights which the courts would protect, it caused great excitement in the North, and aroused intense hostility to the aggressive demands of the slave power.

tisans, but led Horace Greeley and some other leaders of the new Republican party to favor his re-election to the Senate, hoping to separate him from the proslavery interest, and thus introduce a split in the Democratic party. But Lincoln and those who advised with him were firmly of opinion that the anti-slavery cause was safe only in the hands of those who had consistently been its advocates, and took high and strong ground in favor of an aggressive campaign. Lincoln had come to be a really great political manager. He cared little for temporary success, if only he could foster the growth of a right public opinion, and thus make possible a future victory which would be permanent. So, in this campaign, when he proposed to press upon his opponent the question whether there were lawful means by which slavery could be excluded from a Territory before its admission as a state, his friends suggested that Douglas would reply that slavery could not exist unless it was desired by the people, and unless protected by territorial legislation, and that this answer would be sufficiently satisfactory to insure his re-election. But Lincoln replied, "I am after larger game. If Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." Both predictions were verified. The people of the South might have forgiven Douglas his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, but they could not forgive the promulgation of a doctrine which, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, would keep slavery out of a Territory; and so, although Douglas was elected and Lincoln defeated, the Democracy was divided, and it was impossible for Douglas to command Southern votes for the Presidency.

The campaign had been opened by a speech of Lincoln which startled the country by its boldness and its power. It was delivered at the Republican convention which nominated him for Senator, and had been previously submitted to his confidential advisers. They strenuously opposed the introduction of its opening sentences. He was warned that they would be fatal to his election, and, in the existing state of public feeling, might permanently destroy his political prospects. Lincoln could not be moved. "It is true," said he, "and I will deliver it as written. I would rather be defeated with these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people than be victorious without them." The paragraph gave to the country a statement of the problem as terse and vigorous and even more complete than Seward's "irrepressible conflict," and as startling as Sumner's proposition that "freedom was national, slavery sectional." "A house divided against itself," said Lincoln, "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 expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the farther spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful

HIS VIEW OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

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in all the States,-old as well as new, North as well as South." It seems small wonder that Douglas should interpret this as a threat of sectional strife, should magnify it and distort it, and that it should thus be the means of driving many timid voters to the support of the more politic candidate.

Never had the issues of a political campaign seemed more momentous; never was one more ably contested. The triumph of the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, had opened the Territories to slavery, while it professed to leave the question to be decided by the people. To the question whether the people of a Territory could exclude slavery Douglas had answered, "That is a question for the courts to decide," but the Dred Scott decision, practically holding that the Federal Constitution guaranteed the right to hold slaves in the Territories, seemed to make the pro-slavery cause triumphant. The course of Douglas regarding the Lecompton Constitution, however, had made it possible for his friends to describe him as "the true champion of freedom," while Lincoln continually exposed, with merciless force, the illogical position of his adversary, and his complete lack of political morality.

Douglas claimed that the doctrine of popular sovereignty "originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose upon his own responsibility." But Lincoln declared with great solemnity: "No; God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, God did tell him there was one tree of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of death." The question was to him one of right, a high question of morality, and only upon such a question could he ever be fully roused. Slavery is wrong," was the keynote of his speeches. But he did not take the position of the abolitionists. He even admitted that the South was entitled, under the Constitution, to a national fugitive slave law, though his soul revolted at the law which was then in force. His position, as already cited, was that of the Republican party. He would limit the extension of slavery, and place it in such a position as would insure its ultimate extinction. It was a moderate course, viewed from this distance of time, but in the face of a dominant, arrogant, irascible pro-slavery sentiment it seemed radical in the extreme, calculated, indeed, to fulfill a threat he had made to the Governor of the State. He had been attempting to secure the release of a young negro from Springfield who was wrongfully detained in New Orleans, and who was in danger of being sold for prison expenses. Moved to the depths of his being by the refusal of the official to interfere, Lincoln exclaimed: "By God, Governor, I'll make the ground of this country too hot for the foot of a slave."

Douglas was re-elected. Lincoln had hardly anticipated a different result, and he had nothing of the feeling of defeat. On the contrary, he felt that the corner-stone of victory had been laid. He had said of his opening speech: "If

FAME IN A WIDER FIELD.

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I had to draw a pen across my record, and erase my whole life from sight, and I had one poor gift or choice left as to what I should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech, and leave it to the world unerased;” and now, he wrote: "The fight must go on. The cause of liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements. in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come." And the explosion was only two years in coming. Neither was he in doubt about the effect of his own labors. "I believe I have made some marks," said he, "which will tell for the cause of liberty long after I am gone." He had bidden his countrymen "Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me; take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever, but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence;" and defeat, which he foresaw must be temporary, was as nothing to him.

But his great contest had made him famous. It is often said that Lincoln in 1860 was practically unknown outside of Illinois. But this cannot be maintained. In Illinois his name was a household word. "Come to our place," wrote a political manager in 1852, "people place more confidence in you than in any other man. Men who do not read want the story told as only you can tell it. Others may make fine speeches, but it would not be, 'Lincoln said so in his speech.' And now his name was on the lips of every earnest advocate of freedom the country over. At the East there was deep and widespread interest in him. The people who looked up to Seward and Sumner and Wendell Phillips as the exponents of the gospel of freedom rejoiced at hearing of this new prophet, albeit he came from the wilderness.

HIS COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH.

So, when in 1860 Lincoln appeared by invitation to deliver an address at the Cooper Institute in New York, Horace Greeley declared that "No man has been welcomed by such an audience of the intellect and mental culture of our city since the days of Clay and Webster." No audience was ever more surprised. The scholarly people who thronged the immense audience-room had not really believed that any genuine good could come out of the Nazareth of Illinois and the awkward, uncouth appearance of the speaker did not reassure them. They expected to hear a ranting, shallow stump speech, which might be adapted to persuade the ignorant people of a prairie State, but the hearing of which would rather be an ordeal to their cultured ears. But the effort was dignified, calm, clear, luminous. If it was not the speech of a scholar, it was that of a man full of his great subject, and with a scholar's command of all that bore upon it. It is said that those who afterward performed the work of publishing the