It was a bill like many another that had preceded it, as good and as bad as its predecessors.

But there was uneasiness in the air. Two conservative parties, each without principles but with masterful leaders, who were willing to risk war in the pursuit of their personal interests, willing to annex other nations' lands, north or south, in order to dominate: these things put men on pin-hooks. And there were two men in the Senate who watched with eagle eyes the chance to stir an uneasy people to the depths, and themselves ride out the storm: Charles Sumner, of tall form and bishop's bearing, in gay clothes and of somber mien, sitting in the seat of Webster, biding his time; and Salmon P. Chase, six feet tall, well dressed, erect, of high forehead and heavy brow, good to look upon, if less learned than Sumner, without a party but with an ambition as soaring as that of Lady Macbeth herself, likewise biding his time. Douglas's bill gave him the chance of a lifetime; and he took it and hastened, not his own steps to the White House, but the crisis which aroused the slumbering and sullen democracy of all the Northwestern States and called the gentle Lincoln off his dreary backwoods beat.

Chase wrote and Sumner signed with him the famous "Address to the Independent Democrats," wrote and mailed the document in the time he begged Douglas to allow him to study the contents of his bill. On the day the measure was taken up for discussion the Address lay on the sacred desks of New England and clogged the mails of Western editors. It was the twenty-second of January, 1854. Chase and Sumner thus

called in trumpet tones to the faithful yeomen of the North that the time had come to buckle on their armor, that Douglas, "the architect of ruin" (if I may compress the stirring phrases of the Address into a brief quotation), "would open all the territory of the Union to slavery and convert it into a dreary region of despotism inhabited alone by masters and slaves; language fails to express the indignation and abhorrence of honest souls and faithful patriots. Shall this plot against democracy so monstrous and so dangerous to the cause of liberty throughout the world be permitted to succeed? We appeal to the people."

When Douglas rose to explain his measure, a measure which any but the simplest must have seen would have given the North every Territory in question, because every Territory lay within the natural zone of Western and Free-State settlement, the flaming Address was on every senator's desk, its burning words and false interpretations in the news columns or editorials of every paper in the North; and innocent ministers of New England were sending urgent petitions and protests. Douglas explained; he attacked the Address as the work of demagogues; he ridiculed the messengers of the lowly Jesus, war-paint on their faces; he denounced his opponents in a language that showed he was in the toils. It was the beginning of a new epoch; men's lives and fortunes were being put to the hazard of internecine war. Three months the Senate and the House quarreled and fought and voted, and at last passed the bill. The day of the last roll-call the

guns of the old Democratic party roared as they had roared in the days of Andrew Jackson, but the people did not shout. Douglas, sick at heart, if resolute of purpose, wended his way back to Illinois, the road lighted by the blazing effigies of "the great senator." In his own Chicago, which he was endeavoring to build into an imperial city, his friends were unable to rally; his enemies, half drunk, in a vast audience, jeered and shouted him down till midnight. He went home that night weary and despondent, wondering whether his boasted democracy was democracy after all.

Two hundred miles away Abraham Lincoln heard the roar, the hoots and shrill cries of maddened audiences as they listened to denunciations of his former friend and neighbor; and perhaps Mrs. Lincoln herself wondered a little whether she had taken the wrong suitor after all: it was life, American political life; and Abraham Lincoln began slowly to put on his war-paint. The lawcourts lost some of their charm, and the droll tales of backwoods barrooms ceased to grip his attention. There was larger game. In the Western Reserve, Giddings and Giddings and Wade; in northern Indiana, Giddings' son-in-law; all over Illinois, the stalwart Alabama school-teacher, Lyman Trumbull, attacked and denounced the "architect of ruin," who had tried to sell his country for the mere chance at the presidency. Out at Ripon, Wisconsin, old men and young who never had seen anything but wickedness in the Democratic party now wept over the sin of its leader; in southern Michigan,

the rising, privileged, and "righteous" Zach Chandler whetted his tomahawk for the scalp of poor old Lewis Cass, a senator in Congress. Why might not Lincoln join the chase? And Lincoln, now fortyfive, his face hard, dry, and wrinkled, replied to Douglas at the vast State Fair at Springfield on October 4, 1854. He teased and tortured Douglas as one teases a mad bull; Douglas knew not how to answer his earnest and till now unsuccessful friend-the modest, lean, and angular Lincoln talking the gentle language of reason and democracy undefiled-the language of Jefferson and the great Declaration, which Douglas had suffered to rust a little in his memory. It was a trying and a troublesome canvass that Lincoln gave the dapper and boastful senator, now in a sea of troubles; and before it was over, it was plain that, had Douglas himself been a candidate that year, he might have been defeated.

But it was decreed that the plodding lawyer of Springfield was to remain yet a season on the frontier. Lyman Trumbull won the seat in the Senate that Lincoln longed for— Lyman Trumbull, a keen-witted, cruel-minded man, sitting the next session of Congress by the side of Douglas, great Southern senators wondering what was to happen to them and their God-given system if there were to be other addresses to independent Democrats and other senators like Trumbull. From that December, 1854, till another and a more fateful struggle between Douglas and Lincoln in 1858, there were excitements and quarrels and maneuvers all over the uneasy South,

realinements all over the stirring North, a new, radical, idealistic party coming into existence the young Republicans, the brilliant if ponderous Sumner, the while ruthlessly beaten down by the reckless Preston Brooks of South Carolina, off in Paris seeking medical aid and advertising to all the world "the barbarism of slavery." When the little senator went home in the summer of 1858 to fight for his reëlection, the great and the powerful of the earth were against him: the president of the United States was his bitter enemy, sending John Slidell, keeper of the Democratic money-chests, out to Chicago to lay unfriendly wires and remove friendly postmasters; Douglas, married now to the "divine Adele" Cutts, grandniece of Dolly Madison, a grande dame of the city of Washington at the side of her roistering senator, ready to sit upon platforms whether presidents of the United States liked it or not-Mary Todd looking on, wondering.

Abraham Lincoln in his long linen duster was eager; Illinois was ready to give both Lincoln and Douglas a fair hearing, these sons of hers making her name known to the whole world and to all time. Popular sovereignty, too, was winning its way in a shirt-sleeves and a corn-husking country. It was not an uneven debate, Lincoln contending for the immemorial principles of self-determination for all men by direct national methods, Douglas contending for the same principles among all white men and by the direct means of local autonomy. The homely, irreproachable, meditative Lincoln was blocking the path of Douglas and his divine Adele to the goal of their ambition,

and peering now and then down the dimmer way which the busy, up-andcoming Mary thought might be the road to the fateful White House. Slavery and freedom, "despotism" and democracy, were the slogans of their earnest discussion, the rich sophisticated cities of the East wondering what to make of the gawky champion of the North, the angry South growling and denouncing a contest in which both candidates made it plain that its cause was doomed. When the second try-out with Lincoln was over, Douglas was again successful: he won the majority of the legislature that must elect him, Lincoln winning a majority of the people of Illinois that might help elect him to the presidency itself—Lincoln of the meager fortune borrowing money to pay a part of the cost of the debate, five hundred dollars. Lincoln had come a long way since Chase sounded his trumpet-there was yet a long way to go. Douglas went back to Washington to lose the chairmanship of a Senate committee he had long held: his success but the beginning of his ruin. In 1860 the great party of Andrew Jackson broke into halves at Charleston, the one section adhering to the champion of popular sovereignty, Douglas, the other seeking a candidate to speak the will of reaction, of Southern control of the Union, John C. Breckinridge. Douglas, democratic as Lincoln, and convinced that he knew how to save the Union and thwart slavery at the same time, sought votes all over the land, sought them at the cost of his health and his fortune-drinking his way to an early grave.

Chase meanwhile had also gone a long way. His heart was set on the

Republican nomination as the great convention met in Chicago, the second national gathering of the young enthusiastic party, roistering, half drunk, and swearing in roaring, snorting Chicago on May 17, 1860there in the old wigwam on Lake Street, forty thousand Lincoln claqueurs in the choking alleys. But Chase had a great competitor, the little, wiry, seasoned, crafty, oratorical William H. Seward of New York, and still another in the hungry office-monger, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, the same Pennsylvania that so bewonders and bewilders to-day, and the same kind of a candidate. Chase and Seward and Cameron; but the greatest of all was Seward, his car-loads of Easterners, gentlemen, like young George William Curtis, their top-hats matching their shining boots, filling the hotels and paying their fares, to the delight of the enterprising Chicagoans. But there was also the rounded, ambling, awkward, bald-headed editor, Horace Greeley, of the "Tribune," representing an Oregon district, who annoyed Seward and his unscrupulous manager, Thurlow Weed, more than whole troops of claqueurs: Horace Greeley in a bad humor and edging his way into the crowded wigwam-certain to drive a nail in Seward's political coffin at the right moment. Tobacco-juice and saliva made the floor slippery; bottlestoppers tripped one in the aisles, empty bottles alongside the walls, the whole place smelling strong of corn whisky. It was a great convention making ready to choose the nation's greatest standard-bearer. Abraham Lincoln was chosen; and a committee found its way slowly a

few days later to tell the plain Lincoln the well known fact, glasses of harmless water before the distinguished guests, Mrs. Lincoln sitting demurely by the wall. The son of Nancy Hanks, and his wife, had gone far since they sat on the sofa together in the house of exGovernor Edwards. The election returns presently told them they must pack their grips and go farther.

22

On December 20, Thurlow Weed, emissary of William H. Seward and a great committee of the Senate in Washington, knocked at the door of the Lincolns in Springfield. He brought the news that the aged Senator John J. Crittenden, successor to Henry Clay, had persuaded Congress to offer the frantic South another compromise, extension of the ancient Mason and Dixon Line to California, and guaranteeing forever the peaceful existence of slavery south of that line, if only the Southerners would remain in the Union. It was the voice of wisdom, though Lincoln must have seen that it would mean the ruin of his party, for the recent election had denied the Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress. If the Southerners went, the new party would control, perhaps a new era would open. It was not an easy question to answer. While the far-seeing Lincoln talked to the office-monger of his party about Seward and Crittenden, secession and slavery, and, I think, the soft and easy jobs, the telegraph brought the fateful story that South Carolina had withdrawn, the whole State throwing up its hat in hilarious jubilee. What was to be done?

Lincoln was a man of moderation,

not unused to compromise; Weed was a shouting advocate of compromise; Seward, there in the Senate, was a still greater advocate of compromise; even the "wild" Horace Greeley was daily proclaiming, "Let the erring sisters depart in peace.' But there were other voices. Bluff Ben Wade, partner of the fiery Joshua Giddings, with the Shorter Catechism at his tongue's end, a scion of ancient Covenanters, rough, unscrupulous, a field-hand of former days and a cattle-driver of matchless dexterity, ambitious, boastful of his past and dreaming of the White House, was in the Senate and saying: there must be some bloodletting. Charles Sumner, the pacifist, roared every day that there must be war. Nor must one forget Lyman Trumbull and the raw Zachary Chandler, poor old Cass' scalp hanging at his side. They too urged war.

Lincoln took their advice. Weed went sorrowfully back to Seward; and Seward sorrowfully told the great Senate committee that their work was in vain. In a few days six other Southern States went hastily out of the Union of Washington and Jefferson, matching unwisdom with gay defiance. There was anxiety that winter in the simple home at Springfield, in spite of all the brave brags of the Northwestern press; unhappy Lincoln packing his little trunk for Washington while his anxious wife told of brothers and cousins about to join the Southern armies. Time passed. The Lincolns made ready to depart. They bade farewell to their neighbors, to the town of Springfield, grown lovely in their eyes, one of their little ones lying there in the lonely cemetery. In

Philadelphia, on the way, there were great throngs: aspiring grandees of politics, unfriendly opponents who feared his love of democracy and vast dumb masses, waiting the call of the great guns and shallow graves on Southern battle-fields. He lifted his dark face, worn and wrinkled in a life of unceasing toil, and looking kindly out of his little gray eyes from underneath his great shaggy brows, said:

"I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the Declaration of Independence. It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time, which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is the sentiment of the Declaration. Can this country be saved on that basis? If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I would rather be assassinated than surrender it."

"Lifting the weights from the shoulders of all men." How like the master of 1801! How sincere, yet how remote from the world of reality! Slipping out of a side door of his hotel at Harrisburg, where he had gone for a brief address, the night of Washington's birthday, bareheaded, a soft hat in his pocket, a certain furtive look on his furrowed face, the son of Nancy Hanks bade farewell to a world he had had little chance to know, and appeared the next morning in the capital of his country to try again what Jefferson,