Lincoln's Birthday

by Unknown

"Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest," he wrote. "No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon occur." His whole attention was given to conserving what the Republicans had gained—"We have some one hundred and twenty thousand clear Republican votes. That pile is worth keeping together;" to consoling his friends—"You are feeling badly," he wrote to N. B. Judd, Chairman of the Republican Committee, "and this too shall pass away, never fear"; to rallying for another effort,—"The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats."

If Lincoln had at times a fear that his defeat would cause him to be set aside, it soon was dispelled. The interest awakened in him was genuine, and it spread with the wider reading and discussion of his arguments. He was besieged by letters from all parts of the Union, congratulations, encouragements, criticisms. Invitations for lectures poured in upon him, and he became the first choice of his entire party for political speeches.

The greater number of these invitations he declined. He had given so much time to politics since 1854 that his law practice had been neglected and he was feeling poor; but there were certain of the calls which could not be resisted. Douglas spoke several times for the Democrats of Ohio in the 1859 campaign for governor and Lincoln naturally was asked to reply. He made but two speeches, one at Columbus on September 16 and the other at Cincinnati on September 17, but he had great audiences on both occasions. The Columbus speech was devoted almost entirely to answering an essay by Douglas which had been published in the September number of "Harper's Magazine," and which began by asserting that—"Under our complex system of government it is the first duty of American statesmen to mark distinctly the dividing-line between Federal and Local authority." It was an elaborate argument for "popular sovereignty" and attracted national attention. Indeed, at the moment it was the talk of the country. Lincoln literally tore it to bits.

"What is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty?" he asked. "It is, as a principle, no other than that if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object. Applied in government, as he seeks to apply it, it is this: If, in a new territory into which a few people are beginning to enter for the purpose of making their homes, they choose to either exclude from their limits or to establish it there, however one or the other may affect the persons to be enslaved, or the infinitely greater number of persons who are afterward to inhabit that territory, or the other members of the families, or communities, of which they are but an incipient member, or the general head of the family of States as parent of all—however their action may affect one or the other of these, there is no power or right to interfere. That is Douglas's popular sovereignty applied."

It was in this address that Lincoln uttered the oft-quoted paragraphs:

"I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him. That is the build of the man, and consequently he looks upon the matter of slavery in this unimportant light.

"Judge Douglas ought to remember, when he is endeavoring to force this policy upon the American people, that while he is put up in that way, a good many are not. He ought to remember that there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat—a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats to-day, it is true; but that man did not exactly take this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' We know how he looked upon it when he thus expressed himself. There was danger to this country, danger of the avenging justice of God, in that little unimportant popular sovereignty question of Judge Douglas. He supposed there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah—that when a nation thus dared the Almighty, every friend of that nation had cause to dread his wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us."

One interesting point about the Columbus address is that in it appears the germ of the Cooper Institute speech delivered five months later in New York City.

Lincoln made so deep an impression in Ohio by his speeches that the State Republican Committee asked permission to publish them together with the Lincoln-Douglas Debates as campaign documents in the Presidential election of the next year.

In December he yielded to the persuasion of his Kansas political friends and delivered five lectures in that State, only fragments of which have been preserved.