CHAPTER XX.

A GREAT AWAKENING.

Colonization-The Kansas-Nebraska Act-The Barriers Broken DownLincoln's First Great Speech-Stephen A. Douglas-Growth of a New Party-Discovering a Leader-An Oratorical Match.

In July, 1852, Mr. Lincoln was selected by the citizens of Springfield to deliver a funeral oration upon Henry Clay. He performed the public duty allotted him, but with an absence of enthusiasm for his old political idol which occasioned remark. It need not have surprised any who knew him well. He had that upon his mind which forbade his rising to any unusual height of eloquence in dealing with the memory of a statesman whose sun had set behind the clouds of "compromise" of the slavery question. The only noteworthy feature of the address is its bewildered agreement with Mr. Clay's idea of the colonization of the black people in Africa as a possible remedy for existing evils. Clearly foreseeing the awful perils into which the country was drifting; discovering no possibility of emancipation upon the soil of the United States; regarding the continued presence of such a population as a danger to the future welfare of the whites, both of the North and South-all the threatening images with which his inner thought was turning goaded him on in a search which seemed hopeless. In such a state of mind, the vain chimera of a wholesale transportation of the apparent cause of the coming strife and misery to other lands took hold of him with a power which would have been impossible had any alternative proposition been presented. It clung to him for years with a pertinacity which is not at all wonderful, but which is not easy

of explanation to minds which have not had the same problems to deal with.

During the same year Mr. Lincoln made a speech at Springfield, in commentary upon one delivered by Stephen A. Douglas at Richmond, Virginia. Like other ephemeral utterances it has little interest now.

The minor features of the slow movement of national politics in the years preceding the great collision have passed out of sight. It was regarded by some, at that time, as an act of presumption for Mr. Lincoln to assume such an attitude of equality with "the little giant of Illinois."

To Mr. Douglas, however, the whole country was soon to be indebted for an act of servility to the slave-power which set free the forces for a time bound down by the compromises of 1850. The bill afterwards known in history as "The KansasNebraska Act," in its complete form, was reported to the Senate of the United States on the 23d of January, 1854, by Mr. Douglas, as Chairman of the Committee on Territories.

The Act provided for the creation of the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska out of the immense area then bearing the latter name. It removed the safeguards and ignored the solemn compact provided by the Missouri Compromise, and left the people of these or any other Territories, or a tempo rary majority vote of them, empowered to admit or reject human slavery, subject only to the Constitution of the United States, in which there was then no specific barrier. In no other way could the impending peril have been placed before the public in a shape so easily understood. All mere theories were out of date in an instant, when the propagandists of bondage said to the nation: "Here are two new States to be organized. They must be Slave-States. We have broken down the fence agreed upon between you and us. You shall not put up any

more."

The people as a whole were slow in dividing upon the new issue so presented. The Democratic party, North and South,

was wonderfully vigorous and in perfect discipline, and it held the Federal government, with all its machinery of administration, in a grasp of iron. The Whig party was in process of disintegration; dying because it had nothing to live for. There was no existing political organization capable of taking up the challenge of the South. The chiefs of the latter were utterly astounded by the roar of surprise, fury, dismay, of helpless, aimless, moblike wrath which swept the North like a tidal wave from the Atlantic westward.

Mr. Douglas was as much astonished as were his Southern colleagues. He finished his Senatorial work in Washington, and hurried to Illinois to try and persuade the people that his bill did not mean what they all said it did. At Chicago the angry multitude refused to listen to him, and he went on to Springfield.

The State Fair was held in that city in October, drawing together a vast throng from all parts of the State, thoroughly representing its best population; and before that assembly the Senator pleaded in his own defense.

There was one man in Springfield to whom the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the re-opening of the slavery question, had come as a new lease of life. As by one voice the duty of answering Douglas was assigned to Mr. Lincoln, and he may be truly said to have made his first great political speech that day. All the smothered fire of his brooding days and nights and years burst forth in a power and with an eloquence which even those who knew him best had not so much as hoped for.

There was no report made of that speech. Not a sentence of it had been reduced to writing beforehand. He spoke all that was in his heart to speak, and when he sat down there had been a new party born in the State of Illinois, and he was its father, its head, its unquestioned and unquestionable repre sentative and leader.

Mr. Douglas briefly and vainly attempted a reply, ending by

a promise of another speech in the evening; but his defeat had been altogether too complete. He made no second appearance before the assembly which had listened while Mr. Lincoln tore his fallacies to shreds and held his personal political record up to their scorn and ridicule. The evening was occupied instead by a number of the best orators in the State, both Whigs and Democrats, enforcing the great lesson of the day and carrying forward the work which Lincoln had so well begun.

The elements for the formation of a new party were abun dant in every Northern State, and they were aggregating rapidly, but they were yet confused, unorganized, chaotic. There was great intensity of feeling among all the varied and disconnected constituencies, but no formulated expression had been agreed upon. So far as men were able to typify the ideas and purposes to which they were opposed, these were temporarily embodied in Stephen A. Douglas rather than in any Southern leader. It was a distinction of which he afterwards laboriously and painfully divested himself. But he wore it long enough to serve the purpose for which it was given him.

A part of this had been already well served. Publicly, before a vast jury of his fellow-citizens, as the champion of his cause he had met and been vanquished by the man who thenceforward was to express in his own voice and personality, and at last to officially represent and direct, the national will and soul, aroused by proslavery aggression. The service was not fully performed that day, for afterwards Mr. Douglas was to act as a pointing hand, concentrating the eyes of men upon Mr. Lincoln, so that they might know their leader and form column behind him as he went forward.

Much good work for freedom had already been done upon the floors of Congress, in House and Senate; much in the press and in the pulpit; more in talks by firesides and in neighborhood gatherings. The fire passed swiftly from man to man. Had it not been so there would have been no party to organize. It is, nevertheless, a matter of historical record that the exist

ence of the Republican party, unnamed but living, dates from the first collision at Springfield of Stephen A. Douglas with the man who for forty-seven years of toilsome development had unwittingly prepared himself for that hour and for the long struggle which was to follow.

The other orators of the day, the crowd that sympathized, admired, applauded, saw little more than the fact that "Old Abe has made a splendid speech. We did not know it was in him."

Some of them also perceived the evident fact that whenever Mr. Douglas or any other champion of the cause he represented should require to be met again, there could be no doubt as to the popular choice of a man to meet him. Not that Mr. Lincoln was a great man or the equal of Mr. Douglas. He was too near a neighbor for that, and not known much outside of the State. Nothing great about him. They knew him. Had heard him tell stories. Still, he was a sort of growing man, and he could make a right down good speech. A man with a sadly defective education.

There was a reason why Mr. Lincoln did not attend the gathering of the people in the evening after his great Springfield speech. The extreme Abolitionists, blind to the meaning of that which was passing before their eyes, had announced a separate meeting of their own. They had planned, moreover, that the triumphant orator of the day should be there present and be forced to identify himself with their faction. He was plainly an Abolitionist in heart and why should he not become one in name?

It was a thoroughly sincere and honest piece of unwisdom. But even so ardent an antislavery man as Mr. Herndon saw the danger to his friend and to all the interests at stake, and he hastened to give warning. He himself says:

"I rushed to Lincoln and said, Lincoln, go home; take Bob and the buggy and leave the county; go quickly; right off; and never mind the order of your going.' He stayed away till all conventions and fairs were over."