He was most skillful in seeing the danger of Fillmore as a candidate in withholding strength from Fremont. He studied the problem as keenly as a legal proposition. No man in all of the United States saw the issues more plainly or could state it as precisely. To a Fillmore man he wrote that every vote withheld from Fremont and given to Fillmore in Illinois actually lessened Fillmore's chance of being President, for if Buchanan got all the slave states and Pennsylvania, and one other State, he would be elected, but if Fillmore got the slave states of Maryland and Kentucky, then Buchanan would not be elected and Fillmore would go into the House of Representatives, and might be made President by a compromise. Likewise he argued that if Fillmore's friends threw away a few thousand votes on him in Indiana, it would inevitably give those states to Buchanan, which would more than compensate him for the loss of Maryland and Kentucky; that it was as plain as adding up the weight of three small hogs for Fillmore who had no possible chance to carry Illinois for himself, to let Fremont take it, and thus keep it out of the hands of Buchanan. Lamon remarks that this letter was discovered by the Buchanan men, printed in their newspapers, and pronounced, as its author anticipated, "a mean trick," and that it was a dangerous document to them, and was calculated to undermine the very citadel of their strength.[325]
Lincoln's fear of Fillmore was justified by events. While Fremont was defeated, Bissel the Republican was elected Governor by a fair margin. To Lincoln, the defeat of Fremont was prophetic of future triumph. With infinitely surer vision than President Pierce, he perceived the trend of events. Beyond seeming setback, he beheld the triumphing movement. He likened the President to a rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, in felicitating himself hugely over the late presidential election, in considering the result a signal triumph of good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. To the statement of Pierce that the people did it, Lincoln called attention to the fact that those who voted for Buchanan, were in a minority of the whole people by about four hundred thousand votes, and thus the "rebuke" might not be quite as durable as he seemed to think and that the majority might not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority.[326]
Strong in the belief that slavery was at war with the essential spirit of the Republic, he declared that the government rested on public opinion; that public opinion, on any subject, always had a "central idea," and that "central idea" in American political public opinion was until recently "the equality of man," and although it submitted patiently to some inequality as a matter of actual necessity, its constant working was a steady progress toward the practical equality of all men and the late Presidential election was a struggle by one party to discard that central idea and to substitute as a central idea the perpetuity of human slavery and its extension to all countries and colors.[327]
This conviction vivified him with new hopes. The leader called to those in the valley of doubt and indifference to leave their low-vaulted chamber: "Then let bygones be bygones; let past differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old 'central idea' of the republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us; God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare that 'all States as States are equal,' nor yet that 'all citizens as citizens are equal,' but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men are created equal.'"[328]
CHAPTER XIII
LINCOLN AND THE DRED SCOTT DECISION
With unfailing vision Lincoln was attracted to the larger issues under all professed and alleged reasons, both North and South, as to the cause of difference in attitude on the slavery question. He believed it was largely an industrial and economical problem, a moral conflict in the North mainly through the absence of a controlling material interest. With plain, blunt speech, he laid bare the national cancer in October, 1856, showing that there was no difference in the mental or moral structure of the people North and South, but that in the slavery question the people of the South had an immediate, immense, pecuniary interest, while with the people of the North it was merely an abstract question of moral right.
The slaves of the South, he continued, were worth a thousand millions of dollars, and that financial interest united the Southern people as one man; that moral principle was a looser bond than pecuniary interest. Hence if a Southern man aspired to be President, they choked him down, that the glittering prize of the presidency might be held up on southern terms to Northern ambition. And their conventions in 1848, 1852 and 1856 had been struggles exclusively among Northern men, each vying to outbid the other, the South standing calmly by finally to cry "Going, going, gone" to the highest bidder.[329]