No, tender and merciful as Lincoln was, he did not raise his voice for negro emancipation. That thought came years afterwards, when, in the agony of fratricidal strife, he proclaimed the freedom of the blacks as a war measure.
However, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 decided in the Dred Scott case that a negro could not sue in the national courts, and expressed the opinion that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, there was a fierce outcry in the free States, for five of the Supreme Court justices were from slave States. It is impossible to indicate the pitch of excitement in the country.
Senator Douglas, prompt, bold, masterful, faced his constituents in Illinois and stigmatized opposition to the Supreme Court as simple anarchy. Lincoln answered him at once. The people must not resist the court, but it was well known that the court had often overruled its own decisions and “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.”
Another strain was placed upon the nerves of the overwrought country. By trickery the pro-slavery men of Kansas had brought about the “Lecompton Constitution,” permitting slavery in the State. President Buchanan pressed for the admission of Kansas into the Union with this constitution.
So, in 1858, when Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans to succeed Douglas in the Senate, and when he challenged Douglas to a joint debate, the nation was in the throes of an agitation that transcended all other passions in its history.
When the long-legged country lawyer, in loose-hung cloak, faded hat and ill-fitting trousers—sunken-eyed, lantern-jawed and stoop-shouldered—went forth to meet the great Senator before the people, the whole country watched the struggle with intense interest. For, ever since Andrew Jackson overthrew the Virginia oligarchy, the West had grown stronger in the national councils, and it was even now suspected that the balance of political power was passing from the South to the North. And Lincoln, risen from the soil itself, was a singularly bitter challenge to the aristocratic and haughty temper of the slaveowners.
Who can describe that unforgetable and decisive debate in Illinois?
On the very day of his nomination Lincoln uttered the thought that was pressed on and on until slavery and secession were trampled into dust under the heels of the Union armies:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. 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.”
Gaunt, gray-eyed, crooked-mouthed Lincoln! In all history no man ever flayed an opponent as he did Douglas.