And when he was nominated in the roaring Chicago Convention, where the foremost politicians of the East actually shed tears over the defeat of William H. Seward, he let his party do the shouting, promising, denouncing and hurrahing, while he—wiser, cooler, abler than all—stood squarely on his record and his party’s platform, without apology, explanation or mitigation.
To his mind the issue was simple. It could not be misunderstood. Slavery was immoral. It must be confined to the slave States, where it had a constitutional sanction, but uncompromisingly kept out of the free territories.
Yet the country rang with threats that the slave States would break up the Union if Lincoln was elected. He had declared that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. That, they insisted, was a declaration of war against the slave States.
Lincoln drew the short gray shawl about his stooped shoulders, and his face grew more sorrowful. But he said nothing.
Not many months before he had written a letter to a Jefferson birthday festival in Boston, in which he flung the name of Jefferson against the Democrats as Douglas hurled the heart of Bruce into the ranks of the heathen:
“The Democracy of to-day holds the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right of property.
Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men....
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’...
This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.