All Lincoln demanded for the negro was the right to eat the bread which his own hands had earned without leave of anybody.
Lincoln was fond of quoting from the Bible without mentioning the fact, whereas Douglas was often caught differing with the Scriptures. Naturally Lincoln took advantage of his political opponent’s lack of Biblical knowledge.
Judge Douglas, in the debate of July 16, 1858, said: “Mr. Lincoln tells you in his speech made in Springfield, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.’”
Judge Douglas then proceeded to use as his keynote of his speech Lincoln’s sentence: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” arguing eloquently and apparently quite unaware of its Biblical origin.
Referring to Judge Douglas’s criticism of his expression, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln asked: “Does the judge say it can stand? If he does, then it is a question of veracity not between him and me, but between the judge and an authority of somewhat higher character.”
Lincoln’s fondness for scriptural stories and incidents is further illustrated when, having appointed a man to a judgeship who had been suspected of having been connected with a certain secret organization which was opposed to Lincoln’s renomination, he was remonstrated with and his magnanimity criticized. He replied: “I suppose Judge ——, having been disappointed, did behave badly, but I have scriptural reasons for appointing him. When Moses was on Mount Sinai, getting a commission for Aaron, that same Aaron was at the foot of the mountain making a false god for the people to worship. Yet Aaron got the commission.”
As an answer to Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty Lincoln said that he could not understand why, in the Territories, any man should be “obliged to have a slave if he did not want one. And if any man wants slaves,” argued Lincoln, “all other citizens in the Territory have no way of keeping that one man from holding them.”
He denounced fiercely the scheme of the Southern slaveholders to annex Cuba as a plan to increase the slave territory. It may be recalled that the conference at Ostend during Buchanan’s administration was held for that purpose.
Horace White has published an admirable description of his tour with these debaters. In a parade at Charleston thirty-two young ladies, representing States of the Union, carried banners. This “float” was followed by a handsome young woman on horseback, holding aloft a burgee inscribed: “Kansas, I will be free!” Upon the side of the float was the legend:
Westward the star of empire takes its way;