had concluded, Mr. Douglas jumped up and said that he had been abused, "though," he added, "in a perfectly courteous manner." He went on with a rejoinder, and spoke for some time, but without much success. In fact, he was astounded and disconcerted at finding that there was so much to be said against him, and that there was a man to say it so powerfully. The self-confident and even arrogant tone in which he had opened the debate was gone. At closing, he announced himself to continue his remarks in the evening, but he did not do it. He had received a blow too tremendous even for his immense vigor, and from which he could not so quickly recover.
A little while afterwards, Douglas spoke again and Lincoln answered him again, at Peoria, and with a similar result. The vast positive will of the "Little Giant" could not stand up against the still loftier power with which Mr. Lincoln assailed him from the height of a moral superiority that irresistibly carried with it the best convictions of the whole community, and cowed the defiant wrong-doer. Mr. Lincoln was right. Mr. Douglas felt himself vanquished by a power incomprehensible to himself, and of which none of his political calculations ever took account.
But as regards the struggle at this time in Illinois, the fact that he felt himself over-weighted, was sufficiently proved by his declining, after the two duels at Springfield and Peoria, to proceed, as Mr. Lincoln invited him, with a series of such debates in other parts of the State.
Mr. Lincoln, having thus publicly shown himself far stronger than the strongest of his opponents, proceeded to show himself a man of kindly self-command, by foregoing the Republican nomination to the U. S. Senate, and giving it to Hon. Lyman Trumbull, in order to save the risk of admitting Matteson, the pro-slavery candidate. Unquestionably this conduct coincided with the shrewdest selfishness; but very few are the politicians from whom a selfishness small and near would not conceal the larger and further one. It was by earnest and assiduous personal influence that Mr. Lincoln secured Mr. Trumbull's election.
It is said of a certain great diplomatist, that he was so accustomed to dealing with men as knaves that when he had to do with an honest man he always blundered. Douglas' mistake and defeat were precisely of this kind. He had so little sense of conscience or moral feeling himself that he was perfectly unprepared for the uprising of these sentiments on the part of the people, and astonished at the power which a man might wield simply from addressing a class of sentiments which he habitually ignored.
So in Congress, when the petition of the three thousand clergymen was presented against the Kansas and Nebraska bill, he was in a perfect rage, and roared like a lion at bay. That this contemptible question of right and wrong should get up such an excitement and seriously threaten such a brilliant stroke of diplomacy as he meditated, seemed to him, in all sincerity, perfectly ridiculous—he could not sufficiently express his hatred and contempt.
Mere power as a debater, either in parliamentary assemblies or before popular meetings, has often existed, without any share of the calmer, and larger, and profounder, and more reflective abilities of the statesman. Mr. Lincoln possessed both, and in both, his methods were alike of an intuitively practical, and remarkably direct, simple and effective nature. Doubtless he had often given proofs of skill in practical politics, during his consultations of the preceding twenty years, with the leaders and managers of his party in Illinois. Obscure operations of local party organizations seldom make any record, or become visible at all on the surface of history. But the man who in an adverse hour, when all other counsellors have failed, can unite discordant elements into a new party, must be confessed to have statesmanlike skill. This is more peculiarly so when this party must be founded on a moral principle, and must be bounded and circumscribed in its working by moral rules and restraints. While unprincipled men can help themselves by any and all sorts of means, men of principle are confined to those within certain limits, and the difficulties of organization in such cases are vastly greater.
When in 1856 the Illinois convention met to choose delegates to the National Convention that nominated Fremont, there was in the political ocean a wild chaos of elements. Free Soil men, Anti-Nebraska men, Liberty Party men, Native Americans, Old Whigs and Old Democrats, and newly arrived emigrants of no party at all, mixed up in heterogeneous confusion, tossing and tumbling blindly about for a new platform to stand on. After long and vain discussion, the committee on a platform sent for Mr. Lincoln and asked for a suggestion. All the sections of the Convention were opposed to slavery extension, but in no other current political question were they at one. There was imminent danger of discord and division. Their calm adviser quietly said, "Take the Declaration of Independence, and Hostility to Slavery Extension. Let us build our new party on the rock of the Declaration of Independence, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us." Mr. Lincoln's profound and unfailing moral sense had seized upon the relation between the heart of the United States and eternal right. His suggestion embodied the only doctrine that could have won in the coming battle. What he advised was done, and the party, on this platform, revolutionized Illinois, made Mr. Lincoln President, extinguished slavery, and reorganized the nation.
At Philadelphia, the same question came up again, and was solved by adopting the same principle. It was on this occasion that Mr. Lincoln's high position and important influence in the northwest received the first acknowledgement that he was obtaining a national reputation. He obtained a vote of one hundred and ten for the Vice Presidency on the preliminary or informal ballot.
The great effort, however, which finally and firmly established Mr. Lincoln's reputation as a speaker and statesman, was in 1858, when he and Douglas once more were brought to a face encounter before the people of Illinois, as opposing candidates for the U. S. Senate.
During the months of August, September and October, according to the honest western custom, these two opposing candidates stumped the State together, and presented their opposing claims and views in a series of public gatherings. These meetings were in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's invitation, but Mr. Douglas in accepting adroitly contrived to name terms that gave him the opening and the closing turns, not only of the whole series, but of four out of seven of the meetings.
In the June and July preceding, Mr. Lincoln made three other speeches, two at Springfield and one at Chicago, which may be considered a sort of preface to the great debates. The first of these, at Springfield, June 17, 1858, was in some respects the most remarkable of Mr. Lincoln's oratorical productions. It was made at the close of the Republican State Convention which nominated Mr. Lincoln a candidate for the U. S. Senate; and its opening paragraph is so remarkable for style, so heavy with meaning, and so instinct with political foresight, that it is worth quoting entire. It is as follows:
"Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Convention:—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 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 it will cease to be divided. It will become all 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 new, North as well as South."
In this brief statement, Mr. Lincoln set forth the whole object of the southern and northern parties on the slavery question, and though he did not prophesy which way the contest would be decided, he did prophesy exactly the two alternatives to one of which the country was necessarily to advance. It is further noticeable here that Mr. Lincoln's statement includes exactly the same prophecy, only not so classically worded, as Mr. Seward's famous phrase, in his speech at Rochester, the following October, of "an Irrepressible Conflict." And once more; the opening sentence,
