Abraham Lincoln, at the beginning of his celebrated debate with Douglas (1858) expressed his belief that this nation could not exist "half slave and half free." He had, however, made the same declaration in a letter to a Kentucky friend to whom he wrote:
"Experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. . . .
"On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal' a self-evident truth; but now, when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the maxim 'a self-evident lie.' The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great dy for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution. . . . So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free'? The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."
(Under God, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was the instrument for the solution of the mighty problem!)
This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield,
Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:
"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. '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."(125)
Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):
"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."(126)