bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of that gentleman alone. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it that no man would question how I ought to decide."

In his Cooper Union speech may be found his strongest argument. "If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality,-its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension,-its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. . . . Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in the free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care,' on a question about which all true men do care;

such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists; reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

In a letter dated July 28, 1859, he wrote, “There is another thing our friends are doing which gives me some uneasiness. . . . Douglas's popular sovereignty, accepted by the public mind as a just principle, nationalizes slavery, and revives the African slave-trade inevitably. Taking slaves into new Territories, and buying slaves in Africa, are identical things, identical rights or identical wrongs, and the argument which establishes one will establish the other. Try a thousand years for a sound reason why Congress shall not hinder the people of Kansas from having slaves, and when you have found it, it will be an equally good one why Congress should not hinder the people of Georgia from importing slaves from Africa."

While he was campaigning in Ohio, in 1859, occurred the John Brown episode at Harper's Ferry, which created intense excitement throughout the entire country and particularly in the South, where it was interpreted as an organized attempt of the abolitionists to arouse an insurrection among the slaves. In his speeches Lincoln did much to allay public sentiment in Illinois, for he construed the attack upon Harper's Ferry with his habitual common sense. He argued that it was not a slave insurrection, but an attempt to organize one in which the slaves refused to participate, and he compared it with many attempts related in history to assassinate

kings and emperors. "An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people until he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on Old England in one case and on New England in the other does not disprove the sameness of the two things."

It was not long after the inauguration that President Lincoln was compelled to treat the slavery problem in a practical manner. To him it ceased to be a question of morals and became an actual, perplexing problem continually appearing in every direction and in various forms. The first movement of troops dislodged from the plantations of their owners a multitude of slaves, who found their way to the camps of the Union army and were employed as servants, teamsters, and often as guides. The Northern soldier took a sympathetic interest in the escaped slave, and as fast as he advanced into slave territory the greater that sympathy became. A Virginia planter looking for a fugitive slave in a Union camp was a familiar object of ridicule and derision, and he seldom found any satisfaction.

One day the representative of Colonel Mallory, a Virginia planter, came into the Union lines at Fortress. Monroe and demanded three field-hands who, he asserted, were at that time in the camp. General B. F. Butler, who was in command, replied that, as Virginia claimed to be a foreign country, the fugitive-slave law could not possibly be in operation there, and declined to surrender the negroes unless the owner would take the oath of allegiance to the United States. A newspaper correspondent, in reporting this incident, took the ground that, as the Confederate commanders were using negroes as laborers upon fortifications, under international law they were clearly contraband of war. A new

word was coined. From that moment, and until the struggle was over, escaped negroes were known as " contrabands," and public opinion in the North decided that they were subject to release or confiscation by military right and usage. General Butler always assumed the credit of formulating that doctrine, and insisted that the correspondent had adopted a suggestion overheard at the mess-table; but, however it originated, it had more influence upon the solution of the problem than volumes of argument might have had. When it became known among the negroes in Virginia that the Union. troops would not send them back to slavery, the plantations were deserted and the Northern camps were crowded with men, women, and children of all ages, who had to be clothed and fed. General Butler relieved the embarrassment by sending the able-bodied men to work upon the fortifications, by utilizing the women as cooks and laundresses, and by permitting his officers to employ them as servants.

After a time the exodus spread to Washington, and the slaves in that city began to find their way across the Potomac into the military camps, which caused a great deal of dissatisfaction and seemed to have an unfavorable effect upon the political action of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri; so that President Lincoln was appealed to from all sides to order the execution of the fugitive-slave law in States which he was trying to keep in the Union. He believed that public sentiment was growing and would ultimately furnish a solution. He quoted the Methodist presiding elder, riding about his circuit at the time of the spring freshets, whose young companion showed great anxiety as to how they should cross Fox River, then very much swollen. The elder replied that he had made it the rule of his life never to cross Fox River until he came to it.

With the same philosophical spirit, Lincoln made the negro question "a local issue," to be treated by each