66

SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY."

7

question was at this time presented to the people, was that of the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty," as it was termed,―viz., that of the absolute right of emigrants (white emigrants, be it understood) into United States territory not yet organised into States, to introduce or forbid slavery at pleasure; thus contravening not only the known purpose of the chief founders of the Republic, that slavery, whilst suffered to exist where it was already, should not be allowed to extend its limits, but the later compromise with the slave-holding interest, known as the "Missouri Compromise," which expressly prohibited slavery beyond a given parallel of latitude. Of this doctrine of "squatter sovereignty," Mr. Douglas, the "little giant" of Illinois, was the most prominent expounder, and it was generally favoured by the Democratic party at the North. Mr. Lincoln, in the

* It should never be forgotten that a proposal to this effect, put forward in 1784 by the Virginian slave-owner, Jefferson, only failed to become law by the accidental absence of a New Jersey delegate.

8

THE LINCOLN AND

course of his first popular contest with Mr. Douglas, in 1854, when the question was that of its applicability to the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, situate in great measure north of the Missouri Compromise line, and from which, according to the terms of that compromise, slavery should so far have been distinctly excluded, met the doctrine with sturdy good sense. "I admit," he said, "that the emigrant to Kansas and Nebraska is competent to govern himself; but I deny his right to govern any other person without that person's consent." But the same question was again at issue in Mr. Lincoln's second contest for the senatorship with Mr. Douglas, in 1858; and again the former took up the broad ground of opposition to slavery in principle. "Slavery is wrong," he said, in a speech at Cincinnati, in the free State of Ohio, but in the immediate neighbourhood of the slave State of Kentucky, and to a mixed audience from both States. He was hissed for the words, and continued :

"I acknowledge that you must maintain your

DOUGLAS CONTEST.

9

But I find that

opposition just there, if at all. every man comes into the world with a mouth to be fed and a back to be clothed; that each has also two hands; and I infer that those hands were meant to feed that mouth and to clothe that back. And I warn you, Kentuckians, that whatever institution would fetter those hands from so doing, violates that justice which is the only political wisdom, and is sure to tumble around those who seek to uphold it.

Your hisses will not blow down the walls of justice. Slavery is wrong; the denial of that truth has brought on the angry conflict of brother with brother; it has kindled the fires of civil war in houses; it has raised the portents that overhang the future of our nation. And be you sure that no compromise, no political arrangement with slavery, will ever last, which does not deal with it as a great wrong."

The above prophetic passage, which the timidity of Mr. Lincoln's party suppressed in the printed records of his speech, was noted down at the time by one who was latterly a

political opponent of Mr. Lincoln (Mr. M. D. Conway, who has since reproduced it in the "Fortnightly Review"). But it is not more prophetic than were the opening words of Mr. Lincoln's previous speech to the convention which had nominated him :—

"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.”

Side by side, however, with passages like the above, which fully prefigure the grander aspects of Mr. Lincoln's career, we must not overlook the indications of an influence which gave to it also occasionally an aspect of hesitancy, and of at least momentary littleness. In the latter half of the history of the United States, prior to the Secession outbreak, one of the most prominent names is that of Henry Clay. A name not to be looked for in the list of American

Presidents; for it is a singularity of that history that, after the passing through office of Washington and his great contemporaries, the foremost men-Jackson excepted-do not fill the foremost place, but, standing a little behind in official rank, quite overshadow the actual Presidents. During this period, three such men typify three different modes of feeling: Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, the hard Northern feeling, opposed to slavery, caring little for the slave, but devotedly attached to the Union, and scarcely less so to the commercial interests of the North ;-John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, the hard and haughty Southern feeling, caring little for the Union, but devoted to Southern supremacy and to slavery, not in itself, but as the main pivot of that supremacy;--Henry Clay, of Kentucky, finally, the temper of the Border Slave States, capable from its position of sympathising with both parties, anxious to unite both, convinced of the wrong and mischief of slavery, and yet crushed beneath a sense of the difficulty of med