In 1841 Lincoln and Speed had a tedious low-water trip from Louisville to St. Louis. Lincoln says: "There were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me ... a thing which has and continually exercises the power of making me miserable."
But his acts show that he "hit the thing hard." It could not recover from the telling stroke which rent the black oak--the Emancipation Act.
THE "LEX TALIONIS" CHRISTIANIZED.
Frederick Douglass, the colored men's representative, called on the President to procure a pledge that the unfair treatment of negro soldiers in the Union uniform should cease by retaliatory measures on the captured Confederates. But his hearer shrank, from the bare thought of hanging men in cold blood, even though the rebels should slay the negroes taken.
"Oh, Douglass, I cannot do that! If I could get hold of the actual murderers of colored prisoners, I would retaliate; but to hang those who have no hand in the atrocities, I cannot do that!"--(By F. Douglass, in Northwestern Advocate.)
THE SLAVE-DEALER.
"You have among you the class of native tyrants known as the slave-dealer. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but, if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him for a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rolick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to go through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony-- instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse with him and his family.
Those who deny the poor negro's natural right to himself and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death."--(Speech; Reply to Douglas, Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854.)
THE NEGRO HOME, OR AGITATION!
Lincoln was admitted to the law practise in 1837; he went into partnership with John F. Stuart. The latter elected to Congress, he united his legal talents with S. T. Logan's, a union severed in 1843, as both the associates were aiming to be congressmen also. Not being nominated, the consolation was in the courts, with Judge Herndon as partner. It was from this daily frequentation that the latter was enabled to write a "Life of Lincoln."