Abraham Lincoln
We have made a good beginning here to-day. While extremists may find some fault with our moderation they should recollect that "the battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift." In grave emergencies moderation is generally safer than radicalism; and as this struggle is likely to be long and earnest we must not, by our action, repel any who are in sympathy with us, but rather win all that we can to our standard. Our friends who urge an appeal to arms with so much force and eloquence should recollect that the government is arrayed against us and that the numbers are now arrayed against us as well and we should repel friends rather than gain them by anything savoring of revolutionary methods.
As it now stands we must appeal to the sober sense and patriotism of the people. We will make converts day by day; we will grow strong by calmness and moderation; we will grow strong by the violence and injustice of our adversaries. And, unless truth be a mockery and justice a hollow lie, we will be in the majority after a while, and then the revolution which we will accomplish will be none the less radical from being the result of pacific measures. The battle of freedom is to be fought out on principle. Slavery is a violation of eternal right. We have temporized with it from the necessities of our condition; but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that foul lie can never be consecrated into God's hallowed truth!
One great trouble in the matter is that slavery is an insidious and crafty power, and gains equally by open violence of the brutal as well as by sly management of the peaceful. Once let slavery get planted in a locality, by ever so weak or doubtful a title, and in ever so small numbers, and it is like the Canada thistle, you can't root it out. You yourself may detest slavery; but your neighbor has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent neighbor, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your interest and principles to accommodate a neighbor, hoping that your vote will be on the losing side. And others do the same; and in those ways slavery gets a sure foothold. And when that is done the whole mighty Union—the force of the Nation—is committed to its support.
It is a very strange thing, and not solvable by any moral law that I know of, that if a man loses his horses the whole country will turn out to help hang the thief; but if a man a shade or two darker than I am is himself stolen the same crowd will hang one who aids in restoring him to liberty. Such are the inconsistencies of slavery, where a horse is more sacred than a man; and the essence of squatter or popular sovereignty—I don't care how you call it—is that if one man chooses to make a slave of another no third man shall be allowed to object. And if you can do this in free Kansas, and it is allowed to stand, the next thing you will see is shiploads of negroes from Africa at the wharf at Charleston; for one thing is as truly lawful as the other; and these are the notions we have got to stamp out, else they will stamp us out. But we cannot be free men if this is, by our national choice, to be a land of slavery. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.
The conclusion of all this is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise. We must highly resolve that Kansas must be free! We must reinstate the birthday promise of the Republic; we must reaffirm the Declaration of Independence; we must make good in essence as well as in form Madison's avowal that "the word slave ought not to appear in the Constitution"; and we must even go further, and decree that only local law, and not that time-honored instrument, shall shelter a slaveholder. We must make this a land of liberty in fact, as it is in name. But in seeking to attain these results, so indispensable if the liberty which is our pride and boast shall endure, we will be loyal to the Constitution and to the "flag of our Union," and no matter what our grievance, even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State; and no matter what theirs, even if we shall restore the compromise, we will say to the Southern disunionists, We won't go out of the Union, and you shan't!
But let us, meanwhile, appeal to the sense and patriotism of the people, and not to their prejudices; let us spread the floods of enthusiasm here aroused all over the vast prairies so suggestive of freedom. There is both a power and a magic in popular opinion. To that let us now appeal; and while, in all probability, no resort to force will be needed, our moderation and forbearance will stand us in good stead when, if ever, we must make an appeal to battle and to the God of hosts!
FOOTNOTE:
[56] From the celebrated "last speech," made at Bloomington, Ill., May 29, 1856.