conservative vote of the country which elected Buchanan. Slavery, so these conservatives believed, had the protection. of the Constitution, the laws, the judicial decisions of the United States, and was an integral part of the institutional life of the country, not to be interfered with. Indeed, the attitude toward slavery among Northern Democrats in 1856 was quite like the present attitude of most Northern men toward the negro at the South: the South has the negro and must put up with him; the negro question is a Southern question; let the South settle it as best she can and to suit herself; it is none of our affair. So slavery in 1856 was a Southern question; let it alone; let the South manage her own domestic affairs. The conservative spirit of the American people responded to the traditions of law and government and the decisions of courts and chose to bear the ills it had rather than fly to others that it knew not of. Shortly after the election of Buchanan, the case of Dred Scott had its final hearing before the Supreme Court and a few days after the inauguration the decision was given to the world. All the United States was slave soil; slave property could be taken anywhere and must be protected by the whole power of government, State and National; a proslavery administration had been elected: slavocracy had again triumphed.

James Buchanan had been president little more than a year when an utterance came from the West which challenged the attention of thinking America. The Republicans had assembled and had named their candidate for United States senator, in June, at Springfield, the capital of the State; the work of the Convention was over, when the candidate, Abraham Lincoln, made the speech which cleared the issue of the hour of all obscurity, which set the pace of national thought, which disclosed the change going on in the state of mind which so long had ruled in American affairs, and which, it must also be said, alarmed Lincoln's followers and convinced many of them that he had committed an irretrievable political blunder.

"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 into 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 ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently 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 the 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 newNorth as well as South."

He had uttered, voiced the situation in America, in plain and simple language that everybody could understand.

Having stated the principle, he proceeded to discuss its interpretation and application in recent events: the attempt at the nationalization of slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and by the Dred Scott decision; he examined them as results of pro-slavery aggression, and as steps toward the enthronement of slavery as a national institution. Ere long, he said, there would be another Supreme Court decision "declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits. And this may especially be expected if the doctrine of 'care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up,' shall gain upon the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a decision can be maintained when made."

"Our cause, then," he concluded, "must be entrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends-those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work-who do care

for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now?now, when the same enemy is wavering, dissevered and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail -if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come."

This was the voice calling men to political repentance. It was a new voice speaking the convictions of the heart. It was the voice of prophet and seer, the voice of one whom few men in the whole world would have discovered as the leader of a new age. The state of mind which had sustained slavery was changing in America and Lincoln had heralded the change.

From this time on, until the abolition of slavery, Abraham Lincoln is the first American. He had sounded the depths of that state of mind which so long had seemed unchangeable: "A house divided against itself cannot stand;" the Union would become "all the one thing, or all the other:" all slave or all free.

The

The debates with Senator Douglas which followed this speech, beginning at Chicago, with Douglas speaking and Lincoln present, on July 9th, and ending, with Douglas's rejoinder, Lincoln present, at Alton, on the 15th of October, brought Lincoln before the people of the country. joint debate went over the whole ground of slavery extension and slavery limitation; no other speeches in American history possess a like interest or content of exposition of the issue. The difference between the men was in the cause each advocated: Lincoln, the limitation of slavery; Douglas, the letalone policy toward it. In these speeches, twenty-one in

406677

number, delivered in seven Illinois towns-made famous by them are set forth the immediate causes of the Civil War; and yet, when all had been said and the joint debate closed at Alton, no more had been said than Lincoln had said just four months earlier to the Springfield Convention: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently 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 the one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further progress 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."

As the issue stood in 1858, the pro-slavery party, South and North, had the Constitution and the laws on its side, and the Supreme Court had spoken in its defense. For anti-slavery there was but one course-to change public opinion and ultimately thus to change the Constitution, to change the laws and to reverse pro-slavery judicial opinions. This was the programme which Lincoln advocated. It must be shown either that the Constitution had been perverted or that it was wrong; the new party must elect representatives in Congress; State Legislatures and through them United States senators, must elect a president and vice-president, and their successors, and through them change ultimately the membership of the Supreme Court: thus the Constitution would be given an anti-slavery meaning; anti-slavery laws would be passed and anti-slavery decisions handed down. But first, public opinion must be changed.

Of the men who had the ear of the public at the time, Lincoln was becoming first. His debates with Senator Douglas had made him known to all Americans and the opponents of slavery everywhere desired his presence and his counsel: in the campaign against slavery extension he was