Not very long before the time referred to the writer heard Mr. Lincoln, in his debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, declare—laying unusual emphasis on his words: "I have on all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery."
Judge Douglas was what was then called a "dough-face" by the Abolitionists—being a Northern man with Southern principles, or "proclivities," as he called them.
Only a little earlier, and several years after Mr. Lincoln had claimed to be a Republican, and a leader of the Republicans, he had, in a speech at Bloomington, Illinois, asserted that, "the conclusion of it all is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise."
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to encourage the
supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents than anything else that ever happened. Its restoration would undoubtedly have produced a similar effect. Although he is not to be credited with any philanthropic motive, Stephen A. Douglas did an effective work for freedom when he helped to overthrow that measure. Leading Abolitionists have accorded him that meed of praise.
But there was that proposition which Mr. Lincoln was so fond of repeating, that the nation could not remain half free and half slave—"a divided house"—but the remedy he had to propose was not manumission at any proximate or certain time, but the adoption of a policy that, to use his own words, would cause "the public mind to rest in the belief that it [slavery] was in the course of ultimate extinction." Practically that meant very little or nothing. What the public mind then needed was not "rest," but properly directed activity.
But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had become President or had probably thought of such a thing. Did the change of position lead to a change of opinion on his part? We are not left in uncertainty on this point. His official views were declared in what might be called a State paper. Soon after his inauguration, his Secretary of State sent Minister Dayton, at Paris, a dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President
has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution and laws."
About the same time Mr. Lincoln stated to a party of Southern Congressmen, who called upon him, that he "recognized the rights of property that had grown out of it [slavery] and would respect those rights as fully as he would similar rights in any other property."
No steps were taken by Mr. Lincoln to recall or repudiate the foregoing announcements. On the contrary, he confirmed them in his official action. He annulled the freedom proclamations of Frémont and Hunter. He did not interfere when some of his military officers were so busy returning fugitive slaves that they had no time to fight the masters. He approved Hallock's order Number Three excluding fugitives from the lines. He even permitted the poor old Hutchinsons to be sent away from the army very much as if they had been colored people, when trying to rouse "the boys" with their freedom songs. In many ways Mr. Lincoln showed that in the beginning and throughout the earlier part of his Administration he hoped to re-establish the Union without disturbing slavery. In effect he so declared in his introduction to his freedom proclamation. He gave the rebel slaveholders one hundred days in which to abandon their rebellion and save their institution. In view of such things it is no wonder that Henry Wilson, so long a leading Republican Senator from Massachusetts, in his Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, in speaking of emancipation,