A NATIONAL FIGURE

'The fight must go on."-"I shall fight in the ranks.”—Douglas's dearly bought victory. — Lincoln, lacking money for household expenses at end of campaign, returned to work on the circuit. Rising demand upon him to speak in all parts of the country. Answering Douglas in Ohio, September, 1859. -His position on Knownothingism defined. Proposed for the Presidency. "I am not fit to be President." - Addressing a great meeting in Cooper Union, New York, February 27, 1860. His triumphs in the East. His New Haven speech held up as an example in English before a class at Yale.

LINCOLN had met his Bunker Hill. He had taken his stand and fought a good fight in a cause that could not fail. "Though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten," he wrote to a disconsolate supporter, "I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone." Another received this counsel from the defeated candidate, "Let the past as nothing be. . . . The fight must go on," and "I shall fight in the ranks."

Douglas's victory was his own undoing. The Democrats of the South, indignant over the admissions and concessions which he had felt forced

to make in his debates with Lincoln, denounced him as a traitor to his party. He had won the Senatorship but was losing the Presidency. With his usual boldness he hastened southward to reassure the people of the slave states that he had really yielded nothing of value to the interests of slavery. The Almighty, he pleaded, had drawn a line between slave labor and free labor, and slavery could not be adopted with profit in the territory of the North

west.

His valiant efforts to bridge the chasm were all in vain. The house was, in truth, divided against itself. Each day verified anew Lincoln's stern metaphor. Even the Christian Church, in most of its denominations, was divided against itself along Mason and Dixon's unhappy line.

Douglas's own party was hopelessly divided against itself, and he returned to Washington to find that the Democratic caucus of the Senate had removed him in disgrace from the chairmanship of the committee on territories which he had held for eleven years. Jefferson Davis and other southern senators vigorously assailed the "Freeport heresy," and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the subject of earnest discussion on the floor of the Senate through two sessions.

Meanwhile Lincoln was again at work on the

circuit in the old task of getting a living. The lost time and his campaign expenses had told heavily on his slender purse. "I am absolutely without money," he explained, "even for household expenses."

As the state campaigns of 1859 were opened, his services were called for in many places, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa being among the earliest to seek his aid. Wherever Douglas appeared, there was a loud demand for Lincoln. Distant New Hampshire urged him to come there to answer his famous adversary, and New York and Ohio made like requests. "I have been a great man such a mighty little time," he confessed to an enthusiastic admirer, "that I am not used to it yet."

An Indiana leader wrote to tell him that his counsel carried such weight that every political letter falling from his pen was copied throughout the Union. In these letters, which he wrote to his correspondents and to committees, he modestly offered much sane advice.

"I have some little notoriety," he observed on the subject of Knownothingism, "for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands and speaking different languages from myself."

To a Boston organization he sent this clear message: "This is a world of compensation, and he who would be no slave must be content to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it."

When Douglas went to Ohio, Lincoln accepted urgent invitations to answer him at Cincinnati and Columbus. There the Republican State Committee published the reports of the Illinois debates and Lincoln's two Ohio speeches for general circulation, as the best means of educating the people on the issues of the coming campaign of 1860. Thus Lincoln was chosen as the champion of his party's cause before the entire nation, and three huge editions of the addresses found a ready sale.

The men around him, as they gazed wonderingly on the growing fame of their simple neighbor, began to dream of high honors in store for him. One little weekly paper in central Illinois already carried at the head of its columns the name of Lincoln for President. He himself, however, did not yet share these dreams.

"What is the use of talking of me, while we have such men as Seward and Chase?" he said, when stopped on the street by an admiring prophet. "Every one knows them and scarcely any one out

side of Illinois knows me. Besides, as a matter of justice, is it not due to them? There is no such good luck for me as the Presidency of these United States." With that he wrapped his old gray shawl around his shoulders and stalked away.

"I must in candor say," he wrote in a confidential letter in the spring of 1859, "that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency," and he requested that such a thing be not publicly proposed. In midsummer of that year, only nine months before the nomination was to be made, he repeated this modest statement, and as late as December indicated that he intended to bide his time until Douglas came up again for election, five years away, and try once more for his seat in the Senate. "I would rather," he said, "have a full term in the Senate than in the Presidency."

It was not until a meeting of the party leaders of Illinois was held in the winter that he consented to let himself be presented as a candidate for President.

He was much pleased by an invitation, which he had received, to deliver a lecture in New York. His friends were wildly delighted by this recognition of him in the metropolis. Again he burrowed in the State Library and spared no pains in his preparation to acquit himself with credit before an