“Abe Lincoln?” Douglass was puzzled. “I never heard of him.”
“Nope? Well, it don’t matter. You will!”
He was gone then, leaving Frederick Douglass very thoughtful. The Westerner was right. Senator William Seward, a tried and true antislavery man, had been picked. The only question had been whether or not the entire party would accept such a known radical.
Douglass reached Chicago the evening before the nominations were taken up. He found the city decked out with fence rails which they said “Honest Abe” had split. Evidently the people in the streets knew him, the cab drivers and farmers in from the surrounding country. They stood on street corners, buttonholed workmen hurrying home from work, and they talked about “our man.”
Something was in the air. The convention was a bedlam. Even while the thunder of applause that had greeted the nomination of William Seward still hung in the far corners of the hall, Norman B. Judd, standing on a high chair, nominated the man who habitually referred to himself as a “jackleg lawyer.” The roar that greeted Lincoln’s name spread to the packed street outside and kept up until the Seward men were silenced. The cheering died away in the hall, as they began taking the third ballot; but the steady roar in the street found an echo in the chamber, when it was found that Lincoln had received two hundred thirty-one and a half votes, lacking just one and a half votes for nomination. Then Ohio gave its four votes to the “rail-splitter,” and Abraham Lincoln became the Republican candidate for President of the United States.
Three candidates were in the field. Stephen A. Douglas, absolute leader of the Democratic party in the West, had been nominated at Baltimore after a bitter and barren fight at Charleston. The “seceding” Southern wing of the party had nominated John C. Breckinridge. Three candidates and one issue, slavery.
Stephen Douglas’ position was: Slavery or no slavery in any territory is entirely the affair of the white inhabitants of such territory. If they choose to have it, it is their right; if they choose not to have it, they have a right to exclude or prohibit it. Neither Congress nor the people of the Union, outside of said territory, have any right to meddle with or trouble themselves about the matter.
The Democrats of Illinois laughed at the others for hailing forth the Kentuckian. But Breckinridge represented the powerful slavocracy which said: The citizen of any state has a right to migrate to any territory, taking with him anything which is property by the law of his own sure, and hold, enjoy, and be protected in the use of, such property in said territory. And Congress is bound to furnish him protection wherever necessary, with or without the co-operation of the territorial legislature.
Abraham Lincoln’s voice had never been heard by the nation. Easterners waited with misgivings to hear what the gangling backwoods lawyer would say. He did not mince words: Slavery can exist only by virtue of municipal law; and there is no law for it in the territories and no power to enact one. Congress can establish or legalize slavery nowhere but is bound to prohibit it in, or exclude it from, any and every Federal territory, whenever and wherever there shall be necessity for such exclusion or prohibition.