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him at once the head of their church. So he rallied to him his old party, and was proclaimed its senatorial candidate. Against him the Republicans pitted Abraham Lincoln. They knew Lincoln as "Honest Abe," a shrewd politician, a thoroughly trustworthy man, and a moderate but resolute opponent of slavery. To the country at large he appeared as a backwoods lawyer, who had served one term in Congress a dozen years before, with little distinction. No one yet recognized in him the typical and foremost man of American democracy.

Mr. Lamon, the fullest historian of Lincoln's antepresidential life, gives a graphic portraiture of the cir cumstances under which he grew to manhood. His father was an immigrant from Kentucky to Indiana, an ignorant, thriftless, coarse man. Left with two motherless children, he returned to his early home, and brought back to his cabin a second wife, in every way his superior, who found that she had married poverty and degradation. She improved the one possibility which her lot offered, by becoming a true and tender mother to the ragged and neglected boy and girl. Her love and care exercised a gracious influence over their lives. The boy grew up, working now on a farm, now on a flat-boat, now as clerk in a country store; read voraciously the few books he could get hold of; studied law-books, lying stretched at full length before the store with his heels. raised against a tree; went as a volunteer in the Black Hawk war; was sent to the legislature; served one term in Congress as a Whig in 1847-8, and then gave way to another aspirant of his party; practiced law, and, in his own words, "was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri compromise roused him again." As a young man, in the rough backwoods country, he was known as the most powerful wrestler and fighter of the region, when driven into a fray; but a peace-lover

prompt and skillful to allay incipient brawls by his tact and good nature. He was full of good-fellowship, yet a solitary man. His humor was a refuge from underlying sadness. There was in him a deep constitutional melancholy. In his youth the death of the woman to whom he was betrothed depressed him so that for a few weeks he was insane. His ambition met with no great success. His domestic life was clouded. His nature on one side impelled him to activity in large public affairs. He was a shrewd, long-headed politician, with sagacity to read men, and tact and patience to manage them. On the other side that nature was deeply meditative. He brooded in solitude over the problem of human life. In his youth he had accepted the hard materialistic infidelity of the West. Its loud-voiced negations did not long satisfy him; he was weighed upon by the heavy mysteries of human existence, and found no wings to rise above them. Said his partner, Herndon: "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked." But if a friend. met and heartily saluted him, he would answer with a cordial "Howdy, howdy," and detain him to hear a comical story, the fun dancing in his eyes and playing over every feature.

The popular title of "Honest Abe" hit a central trait in the man. His character and his mind were veracious to the core. This is the quality which gives to his written speeches their power and charm. One feels that the speaker is always going as near as he can to the heart of the matter. There are no mellifluous nothings. Every word stands for something. His mind laid hold with firm grasp on every fact it could reach. It combined and interpreted its facts in the daylight of plain common sense. It confined itself to the solid earth; its movements were slow, but without pause or retreat. The. man was true, with a painful fidelity to the facts of each

present situation, weighing, testing, hesitating, while prophets and theorists rushed with fiery energy to their conclusions. But his path of action once chosen, he moved on as inflexibly as gravitation. Personal ambition he had in abundance; but he held it subject to a profound sense of justice and a sensitive humanity.

Lincoln's attitude toward slavery was that of the humane and conscientious men throughout the North who were not Abolitionists. He hated it; he opposed its extension; but, as existing in the Southern states, it had to him the sanction of an established political order, which could not be defied without inviting anarchy. In 1855 he wrote to his friend, J. F. Speed, of Kentucky:

"I acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Constitution in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes and unrequited toils; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841, you and I had together a tedious lowwater trip in a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as well as I do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continued torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. I do oppose the extension of slavery, because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no obligations to the contrary."

A mind which is deeply tenacious of concrete facts and chary of theories and abstractions, when it sometimes rises, perhaps suddenly, to a broad and commanding view, speaks with a deliberate weight of inmost conviction. It

is this feeling of solid reality which gives their majesty to Lincoln's Gettysburg address and second inaugural. Those utterances stand for us among the noblest chapters of that national history which Carlyle says makes for every people its own Bible. It was with some such illumination that Lincoln spoke in the address with which he began his campaign against Douglas in 1858.

"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 it will cease to be divided. It will become all 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 the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states-old as well as new, North as well as South."

This declaration was followed by a lucid exposition of that march of aggression by which successively the barrier of the Missouri compromise had been thrown down; then the permission to a territorial population to exclude slavery had been refused by Congress; next a. Supreme Court decision given that slavery had an inalienable title to exist in all the territories; and a door carefully left open in this same decision for a future ruling that the master might take his slaves into the free states. In the whole speech there was no passion and no exaggeration. He summoned the North to resistance only through the ballot-box. He went no further than opposition to any extension of slavery. The extinction of slavery where it already existed, he anticipated as a probability on broad philosophic grounds, but did not for a moment regard it as the legitimate object of political action on the part of the North.

Lincoln, as Lamon narrates, read this speech in advance to a council of his friends, and they all, with the single exception of Herndon,—an old Abolitionist,-protested against it, as far in advance of the time, of doubtful truth, and full of danger to his prospects. Lincoln made sober answer that he was convinced its opinions were true, and needed to be spoken; if he was to go down because of saying it, then he chose to go down. "This nation cannot live on injustice!" The speech did injure his standing with the people of Illinois, and tended to his defeat in the immediate contest. It was arranged that the two rivals for the senatorship should address the people at the same place and time, in a series of joint debates. These debates were watched with great interest not only in Illinois but throughout the North. The subject discussed was mainly the question of congressional exclusion of slavery from the territories, as against "popular sovereignty." Each did his best to drive his opponent to disadvantageous positions. Each offered a series of questions to which the other was bound to reply. It was a tug of skilled wrestlers. Douglas's appeal was to the coarsely selfish man, jealous for his own rights and not sensitive to the rights of others. Democracy of the vulgar and self-assertive kind has never found a better mouth-piece. He was loud in proclaiming his own indifference to slavery; he "didn't care whether slavery was voted up or voted down." His plea was, in substance, "You have a right to go into a territory, and there you and your neighbors have the right to settle your own affairs as you please, and neither Congress nor anybody else has a right to interfere." He made great capital out of the prejudice, strong in Illinois, against the negro race; he represented Lincoln as a negro-lover, an Abolitionist, a foe to the South. Against these attacks, and in reply to Douglas's questions, Lincoln took ground

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