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eye on the Presidency. The party had every member of Congress, excepting Richard Yates, who had been elected by a small majority. The Liberty Party now knew by the numbering of their votes that they had it in their power to turn the scale in favor of the weakening Whig party, or let the power remain with the Democrats. In the election of 1852, they stood by their colors on the presidential vote, and gave to John P. Hale nearly 10,000 votes. But enough of them, under the advice of their leaders, and the indirect influence of the Western Citizen, so diverted their votes to Congressmen, who they knew were pledged to their principles and against Douglas' pet doctrines, that they secured the election of several Whigs to Congress, and independent democrats, so that the State was at once taken out of the hands of the democrats, and that arrogant power in Illinois was broken forever. It was at this election and by this policy that Hon. E. B. Washburne was first elected to Congress./ Who now can measure the consequences that grew out of that choice?

Mr. Lincoln was made the candidate of the Whig party in the winter of 1854 against the re-election of Gen. Shields to the Senate. The Liberty party vote had contributed to the election of a so-called Whig delegation in Congress. A large number of Free Soilers and Independent Democrats had contributed to the same result. In the State legislature the Free Soilers and Liberty party held the balance of power. It was thought that it was asking a little too much that they should be required also to magnify the old Whig party, by giving their power to the Senate also, as they would have done had Mr. Lincoln been elected by their votes, and it would have been accounted a Whig party triumph instead of a triumph of the people, and the Liberty party would have been held responsible for selling out to the Whigs. They had to study the art of using their power and keeping it. For this reason Mr. Lincoln did not receive the support of this class of representatives, as Mr. Washburne and Mr. Norton had received that class of votes; but the Independent and Liberty vote was given to Lyman Trumbull, and he was elected Senator, and Mr. Lincoln reserved for a higher position. It was a most fortunate thing, indicating wise political management, that Mr. Lincoln was not elected Senator at that election. The Republican party was informally organized in 1854, consummated in the nomination of Fremont in 1856. The Liberty party holding to its principles, was only merged into the Republican after this date.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise soon followed this election, and Mr. Douglas seemed to vainly hope to recover his

lost popularity at home, by tl e success of this measure, and the double-sided view that seemed to some extent, to be taken of it at the North and South-at the South as a measure for the extension of slavery beyond its original boundary line; at the North as favoring the extension of liberty beyond the line of its former restriction. Mr. Douglas' artful insinuation of the act was that if it was originally wrong to pass that compromise, it was now a long-deferred right to repeal it. But the moral sense of the nation interpreted it otherwise. It was looked upon along with the Dred Scott decision, as treading down the last barrier against the supremacy of the slavery power. This repeal put the antagonistic forces more directly in battle array.

Mr. Douglas' term in the Senate was to expire next, and the re-election, or the election of another one in his place, would occur in the session of the legislature in the winter of 1858-9. Mr. Lincoln was opportunely in reserve to be put into the field in this contest. Mr. Douglas was looking to the endorsement. of his own State after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in his own re-election, and as a stepping-stone for the higher position of a nomination to the presidency, by the democratic party.

The old Whigs had unlimited confidence in Mr. Lincoln; he was the most popular man in the party. But there was some earnest inquiry by those who had previously opposed his election. as Senator, as to his fitness to represent them in the hoped-for re-organization of party on the question of the Liberty Party resolution of 1842, "Freedom or Slavery." Would Mr. Lincoln be such a partisan that he would elect to live or die as a Whig, and die with his party? or was he prepared to live if his party should die? Affairs had got to that state that it seemed as if the good old Whig party, which had been much idolized, must be the first to die for the people.

The editor of the Western Citizen, about this time, visited Springfield in company with Cassius M. Clay. He took the occasion to call upon Mr. Lincoln, but had no conversation on political subjects. He remembered that a client of Mr. Lincoln's, who was the agent of the Underground Railway at Springfield, and who had employed Mr. Lincoln as his attorney in all times trouble, and who greatly esteemed him-had paid for a copy of his paper from year to year, which he had had addressed to A. Lincoln. He remembered that at the mast-head of this paper, this motto had been ever carried as Lundy had carried it-"We hold these truths to be self-evident," etc.; and he had some desire to know how this doctrine fitted on the great lawyer who was the defender of the agent of the Underground Railroad

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against legal prosecution. This agent said Mr. Lincoln was all right on the negro question; he gave money when necessary, to help the fugitives on the way to freedom. There was some desire to know if he would stand right on the National questions if he were elected to the Senate, as there was then a prospect of his being a competitor of Judge Douglas. An interview was had with Mr. Herndon, his law-partner. Mr. Herndon said Mr. Lincoln was all right. "He has been an attentive reader of your paper for several years; he believes in the Declaration of Independence, and he is a great reader of the abolition papers. He is well posted. That he might get all sides of that question, I take Garrison's Liberator, and he takes the National Era and the Western Citizen. Although he does not say much, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lincoln is all right; when it becomes necessary, he will speak so that he will be understood." And he did speak to the Bloomington Convention. After this there was no longer any opposition to Mr. Lincoln from the most radical of the abolitionists. They understood him; they knew that he was wholly with them; that the great inspiration of his life, was the restoration of the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, to the administration of the government.

Mr. Douglas found that his doctrine of squatter sovereignty rather over-acted itself with his own democratic party. He builded worse than he had contemplated, and he was brought into discord with a wing of his own party on the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas, which had been adopted by the Missouri invaders, and which he strenuously opposed because there was too much squatter sovereignty in it. But on his return to Illinois at the close of the session, in the spring of 1857, Mr. Douglas expressed in his speech at Springfield, a determination to maintain all the positions he had taken in the Senate on the slavery question, intimating that he might even sustain the Lecompton Convention, and its slaveholding constitution, and on this basis go before the people for re-election. Whenever Mr. Douglas made a speech defining his policy, the public expected a reply from Mr. Lincoln. In this instance they were not disappointed, and in two weeks Mr. Lincoln reviewed Mr. Douglas' leading speech. In this speech occurs this remarkable passage, referring to a portion of Judge Taney's memorable Dred Scott decision:

In those days (early times of the country) our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, philosophy follows, and

the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prisonhouse; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

There is almost the hint of prophecy in this paragraph. Mr. Lincoln, in less than eight years, led by Providence, found the instrument to unlock that prison-house without the key, and set the prisoner free.

In this same speech at Springfield we find the following:

"He (Douglas) finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white, and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend that it does, want to vote, eat, sleep and marry with negroes. I protest against this counterfeit logic. * If I do not want a black woman for

*

a slave, it does not follow that I want her for a wife. * * In some respects she is not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hand without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal and the equal of all others.'

The Senatorial question was the great question of Illinois in the year of 1858. Mr. Douglas was already on the stump in defense of his measures which he had pressed upon the nation, through the Senate. Mr. Lincoln, who was regarded as his natural competitor and opponent, had been prompt to volunteer to reply to Douglas' introductory speeches, an extract from one of which we have just given. The unusual practice was resorted to by the new party of Republicans, of holding a State Convention for the nomination of a candidate for Senator, and Mr. Lincoln was cordially put in nomination. The question was not to be determined by their votes, but by the votes of the representatives in the State Legislature. Therefore, in the canvass representatives were selected in view of settling the Senatorial succession, whether it should be Douglas, a democrat, or Lincoln, a Republican. It was well understood that in Mr. Douglas' case it would settle more than the Senatorial question; with him it was also a nomination for the Presidency. With Mr. Lincoln it was only a contest with this champion Democrat for the senatorship, but more in the contest than on anything else, for the prospect of defeating Mr. Douglas on his own ground did not seem very brilliant.

This story is told of Mr. Lincoln, that illustrates his view of the situation. An inquirer says to Mr. Lincoln, "What do you

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expect to do? You don't expect to beat Douglas, do you?" Mr. Lincoln responded that it was with him as it was with the boys who made an attack on a hornet's nest. "What do you expect to do, boys? You don't calculate to take that hornet's nest, do you?" "We don't know that we shall exactly take it, but we shall bedevil the nest." "So," Mr. Lincoln said, "if we don't capture Douglas we shall bedevil his nest." That is about the way Douglas found it, some time after the election.

The debate which followed between Lincoln and Douglas, was one of the most important political debates that ever occurred. in this country. Mr. Douglas had already become a national man through the strength of his character and genius, and for his daring in political lofty-tumbling. Mr. Lincoln was not well known beyond his own State, but at home well known as a keen debater, and a match in logic and hard-drawn arguments for his brilliant opponent.

Mr. Lincoln was nominated as a condidate for the Senate, at the convention at Springfield, June 17, 1858. At the close of the convention, he struck the key-note of the debate on the issues of the day, in the opening paragraph of his speech. It has since been numbered with others of the remarkable historical and prophetical utterances of that wonderful man. It is the famous declaration that this Union could not permanently endure half slave and half free. It is matched only by Mr. Seward's "irrepressible conflict." Said Mr. Lincoln:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far in the fifth year, since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not closed, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis has been reached and passed, A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot permanently endure 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 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 was uttered, as Mr. Greeley says, by one born in Kentucky under the influence of slavery, and but recently a conserv ative politician, four months before, Mr. Seward put forth his more classical prophetic statement; and the two are more interesting for standing in parallel companionship. Said Mr. Seward:

"These antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results. Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think