“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just,” he exclaimed in one of his loftiest moments.
He pelted Douglas with logic, exposed the sham of his “squatter sovereignty” doctrine, and pitilessly analyzed the predatory policy of the slavery forces. He forced Douglas to defend and explain his Kansas-Nebraska law, trapped him into confusing admissions and showed that his popular sovereignty principle meant simply “that if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man, nor anybody else, has a right to object.”
Against the awkward country lawyer with shriveled, melancholy countenance and shrill voice, the polished, handsome and resourceful Douglas contended in vain in the seven monster outdoor meetings of the debates. The humanity of Lincoln, the fairness of his statements, the moral height from which he spoke, the homely, cutting anecdotes, the originality and imagination, the obvious simplicity and sincerity of his arguments beat down Douglas’ lawyer-like pleas.
Douglas charged Lincoln with favoring the political and social equality of the white and black races. Lincoln denied that he considered the negro the equal of the white man. “But in the right to eat the bread which his own hands earns,” he added, “he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Nothing in the whole story of the American people approaches this struggle between Lincoln and Douglas for dramatic setting and popular enthusiasm; and nothing in Lincoln’s life proved more clearly that with his feet set upon a moral issue he was matchless. He was filled with the majesty of his cause.
“If slavery is right,” he said that winter in Cooper Institute, New York, “all words, acts, laws and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality, its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise facts upon which depends the whole controversy.”
In the race for the Senatorship Douglas defeated Lincoln; but in that defeat Lincoln won a great victory in the awakened conscience and courage of the North.
An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W. McClellan of New York
We who love him now can hardly understand how deep was the love and how great the confidence that, a year later, raised the cabin-born, uncouth country lawyer and politician to be President of the United States.