Alluding to the extra-constitutional measures advocated by the Abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln in his speech at Quincy, Ill., October 13, 1858, said:
"If there be any man in the Republican Party who is impatient over the necessity springing from its (slavery's) actual presence, and is impatient of the constitutional guarantees thrown around it, and would act in disregard of these, he too is misplaced, standing with us. He will find his place somewhere else; for we have a due regard, so far as we are capable of understanding them, for all these things."[[284]]
So too with respect to armed invasions and the attempt of John Brown and his abettors to precipitate servile insurrection.
Mr. Lincoln, in his speech at Cooper Union, New York, February 27th, 1860, said:
"You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise."[[285]]... Continuing, he said: "John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors."[[286]]
SLAVERY A DOOMED INSTITUTION
If it be urged that Mr. Lincoln's oft-quoted words uttered before his nomination for the Presidency, that "The Government could not endure half slave and half free," were at war with his assurances and that Virginia was thus threatened in her "peculiar institution," yet it must be remembered that Mr. Lincoln, time and again before his election, disclaimed any such purpose and denied that his words were susceptible of any such construction.
Morse, in his Biography of Lincoln, says: "Again and again Mr. Lincoln called attention to the fact that he had expressed neither 'a doctrine' nor an 'invitation'; nor any 'purpose,' nor 'policy' whatsoever."[[287]]
To quote the language of Mr. Lincoln himself in meeting the charge in his debate with Stephen A. Douglas:
"In the passage I indicated no wish or purpose of my own. I simply expressed my expectations. Cannot the Judge perceive a distinction between a purpose and an expectation? I have often expressed an expectation to die, but I have never expressed a wish to die."[[288]]