The Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Henry Ketcham

The speech was strictly intellectual from beginning to end. Though Lincoln was not known in New York, Douglas was. So he fittingly took his start from a quotation of Douglas. The speech cannot be epitomized, but its general drift may be divined from its opening and closing sentences.

The quotation from Douglas was that which had been uttered at Columbus a few months before: "Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question (the question of slavery) just as well, and even better, than we do now." To this proposition the orator assented. That raised the inquiry, What was their understanding of the question? This was a historical question, and could be answered only by honest and painstaking research.

Continuing, the speaker said: "Does the proper division of local from Federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal government to control as to slavery in our Federal territories? Upon this Senator Douglas holds the affirmative and the republicans the negative. This affirmation and denial form an issue, and this issue— this question—is precisely what the text declares our fathers understood 'better than we.'

"I defy any one to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century), declare that in his understanding any proper division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery in the Federal territories. To those who now so declare, I give, not only 'our fathers who framed the government under which we live,' but with them all other living men within the century in which it was framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them."

One paragraph is quoted for the aptness of its illustration: "But you will not abide the election of a republican President! In that supposed event, you say you will destroy the Union; and then you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' To be sure, what the robber demanded of me—my money—was my own, and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle."

The speech reached its climax in its closing paragraph: "Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that so much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national territories, and to overrun us here in the free states? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who would be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals to beseech all true Union men to yield to Disunionists; reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

This speech placed Lincoln in the line of the presidency. Not only was it received with unbounded enthusiasm by the mass of the people, but it was a revelation to the more intellectual and cultivated. Lincoln afterwards told of a professor of rhetoric at Yale College who was present. He made an abstract of the speech and the next day presented it to the class as a model of cogency and finish. This professor followed Lincoln to Meriden to hear him again. The Tribune gave to the speech unstinted praise, declaring that "no man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience."

The greatest compliment, because the most deliberate, was that of the committee who prepared the speech for general distribution. Their preface is sufficiently explicit:

"No one who has not actually attempted to verify its details can understand the patient research and historical labors which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters; and these are defective in completeness and accuracy of statement, and in indices and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not traveled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln has turned from the testimony of 'the fathers' on the general question of slavery, to present the single question which he discusses. From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words, contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify, and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire."