"Before proceeding, let me say, I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people: they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it: if it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South. Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence. We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North, and become tip-top Abolitionists; while some Northern men go South, and become cruel slave-masters.
"When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the existing slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land; but a moment's reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and, if mine would, we all know that those of the great mass of white people would not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South. When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in its stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter.
"But Nebraska is urged as a great Union-saving measure. Well, I, too, go for saving the Union. Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it, rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one. But, when I go to Union-saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have adaptation to the end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation. 'It hath no relish of salvation in it.' It is an aggravation, rather, of the only one thing which ever endangers the Union. When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet. The nation was looking to the forming of new bonds of Union, and a long course of peace and prosperity seemed to lie before us. In the whole range of possibility, there scarcely appears to me to have been any thing out of which the slavery agitation could have been revived, except the project of repealing the Missouri Compromise. Every inch of territory we owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question, and by which all parties were pledged to abide. Indeed, there was no uninhabited country on the continent which we could acquire, if we except some extreme Northern regions, which are wholly out of the question. In this state of the case, the Genius of Discord himself could scarcely have invented a way of getting us by the ears, but by turning back and destroying the peace measures of the past.
"The structure, too, of the Nebraska Bill is very peculiar. The people are to decide the question of slavery for themselves; but when they are to decide, or how they are to decide, or whether, when the question is once decided, it is to remain so, or is to be subject to an indefinite succession of new trials, the law does not say. Is it to be decided by the first dozen settlers who arrive there, or is it to await the arrival of a hundred? Is it to be decided by a vote of the people, or a vote of the Legislature, or, indeed, on a vote of any sort? To these questions the law gives no answer. There is a mystery about this; for, when a member proposed to give the Legislature express authority to exclude slavery, it was hooted down by the friends of the bill. This fact is worth remembering. Some Yankees in the East are sending emigrants to Nebraska to exclude slavery from it; and, so far as I can judge, they expect the question to be decided by voting in some way or other. But the Missourians are awake too. They are within a stone's-throw of the contested ground. They hold meetings and pass resolutions, in which not the slightest allusion to voting is made. They resolve that slavery already exists in the Territory; that more shall go there; and that they, remaining in Missouri, will protect it, and that Abolitionists shall be hung or driven away. Through all this, bowie-knives and six-shooters are seen plainly enough, but never a glimpse of the ballot-box. And really, what is the result of this? Each party within having numerous and determined backers without, is it not probable that the contest will come to blows and bloodshed? Could there be a more apt invention to bring about a collision and violence on the slavery question than this Nebraska project is? I do not charge or believe that such was intended by Congress; but if they had literally formed a ring, and placed champions within it to fight out the controversy, the fight could be no more likely to come off than it is. And, if this fight should begin, is it likely to take a very peaceful, Union-saving turn? Will not the first drop of blood so shed be the real knell of the Union?"
No one in Mr. Lincoln's audience appreciated the force of this speech more justly than did Mr. Douglas himself. He invited the dangerous orator to a conference, and frankly proposed a truce. What took place between them was explicitly set forth by Mr. Lincoln to a little knot of his friends, in the office of Lincoln & Herndon, about two days after the election. We quote the statement of B. F. Irwin, explicitly indorsed by P. L. Harrison and Isaac Cogdale, all of whom are already indifferently well known to the reader. "W. H. Herndon, myself, P. L. Harrison, and Isaac Cogdale were present. What Lincoln said was about this: that the day after the Peoria debate in 1854, Douglas came to him (Lincoln), and flattered him that he (Lincoln) understood the Territorial question from the organization of the government better than all the opposition in the Senate of the United States; and he did not see that he could make any thing by debating it with him; and then reminded him (Lincoln) of the trouble they had given him, and remarked that Lincoln had given him more trouble than all the opposition in the Senate combined; and followed up with the proposition, that he would go home, and speak no more during the campaign, if Lincoln would do the same: to which proposition Lincoln acceded." This, according to Mr. Irwin's view of the thing, was running Douglas "into his hole," and making "him holler, Enough."
Handbills and other advertisements announced that Judge Douglas would address the people of Lacon the day following the Peoria encounter; and the Lacon Anti-Nebraska people sent a committee to Peoria to secure Mr. Lincoln for a speech in reply. He readily agreed to go, and on the way said not a word of the late agreement to the gentleman who had him in charge. Judge Douglas observed the same discreet silence among his friends. Whether they had both agreed to go to Lacon before this agreement was made, or had mutually contrived this clever mode of deception, cannot now be determined. But, when they arrived at Lacon, Mr. Douglas said he was too hoarse to speak, although, "a large portion of the people of the county assembled to hear him." Mr. Lincoln, with unheard-of magnanimity, "informed his friends that he would not like to take advantage of the judge's indisposition, and would not address the people." His friends could not see the affair in the same light, and "pressed him for a speech;" but he persistently and unaccountably "refused."
Of course, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Douglas met no more during the campaign. Mr. Douglas did speak at least once more (at Princeton), but Mr. Lincoln scrupulously observed the terms of the agreement. He came home, wrote out his Peoria speech, and published it in seven consecutive issues of "The Illinois Daily Journal;" but he never spoke nor thought of speaking again. When his friends insisted upon having a reason for this most unexpected conduct, he gave the answer already quoted from Mr. Irwin.
The election took place on the 7th of November. During his absence, Mr. Lincoln had been announced as a candidate for the House of Representatives of the Illinois Legislature. William Jayne took the responsibility of making him a candidate. Mrs. Lincoln, however, "saw Francis, the editor, and had Lincoln's name taken out." When Mr. Lincoln returned, Jayne (Mrs. Lincoln's old friend "Bill") went to see him. "I went to see him," says Jayne, "in order to get his consent to run. This was at his house. He was then the saddest man I ever saw,—the gloomiest. He walked up and down the floor, almost crying; and to all my persuasions to let his name stand in the paper, he said, 'No, I can't. You don't know all. I say you don't begin to know one-half, and that's enough.' I did, however, go and have his name re-instated; and there it stood. He and Logan were elected by about six hundred majority." Mr. Jayne had caused originally both Judge Logan and Mr. Lincoln to be announced, and they were both elected. But, after all, Mrs. Lincoln was right, and Jayne and Lincoln were both wrong. Mr. Lincoln was a well-known candidate for the United States Senate, in the place of Mr. Shields, the incumbent, who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill; and, when the Legislature met and showed a majority of Anti-Nebraska men, he thought it a necessary preliminary of his candidacy that he should resign his seat in the House. He did so, and Mr. Jayne makes the following acknowledgment: "Mr. Lincoln resigned his seat, finding out that the Republicans, the Anti-Nebraska men, had carried the Legislature. A. M. Broadwell ran as a Whig Anti-Nebraska man, and was badly beaten. The people of Sangamon County was down on Lincoln,—hated him." None can doubt that even the shame of taking a woman's advice might have been preferable to this!
But Mr. Lincoln "had set his heart on going to the United States Senate." Counting in the Free-soil Democrats, who had revolted against Mr. Douglas's leadership, and been largely supported the Whigs in the late elections, there was now on joint ballot a clear Anti-Nebraska majority of two. A Senator was to be chosen to succeed Mr. Shields; and Mr. Lincoln had a right to expect the place. He had fairly earned the distinction, and nobody in the old Whig party was disposed to withhold it. But a few Abolitionists doubted his fidelity to their extreme views; and five Anti-Nebraska Senators and Representatives, who had been elected as Democrats, preferred to vote for a Senator with antecedents like their own. The latter selected Judge Trumbull as their candidate, and clung to him manfully through the whole struggle. They were five only in number; but in the situation of affairs then existing they were the sovereign five. They were men of conceded integrity, of good abilities in debate, and extraordinary political sagacity. Their names ought to be known to posterity, for their unfriendliness at this juncture saved Mr. Lincoln to the Republicans of Illinois, to be brought forward at the critical moment as a fresh and original candidate for the Presidency. They were Judd of Cook County, Palmer of Macoupin, Cook of La Salle, Baker and Allen of Madison. They called themselves Democrats, and, with the modesty peculiar to bolters, claimed to be the only "Simon-pure." "They could not act with the Democrats from principle, and would not act with the Whigs from policy;" but, holding off from the caucuses of both parties, they demanded that all Anti-Nebraska should come to them, or sacrifice the most important fruits of their late victory at the polls. But these were not the only enemies Mr. Lincoln could count in the body of his party. The Abolitionists suspected him, and were slow to come to his support. Judge Davis went to Springfield, and thinks he "got some" of this class "to go for" him; but it is probable they were "got" in another way. Mr. Lovejoy was a member, and required, as the condition of his support and that of his followers, that Mr. Lincoln should pledge himself to favor the exclusion of slavery from all the Territories of the United States. This was a long step in advance of any that Mr. Lincoln had previously taken. He was, as a matter of course, opposed to the introduction of slavery into the Territories north of the line of 36° 30'; but he had, up to this time, regarded all south of that as being honestly open to slavery. The villany of obliterating that line, and the necessity of its immediate restoration,—in short, the perfect sanctity of the Missouri settlement,—had formed the burden of all his speeches in-the preceding canvass. But these opinions by no means suited the Abolitionists, and they required him to change them forthwith. He thought it would be wise to do so, considering the peculiar circumstances of his case; but, before committing himself finally, he sought an understanding with Judge Logan. He told the judge what he was disposed to do, and said he would act upon the inclination, if the judge would not regard it as "treading upon his toes." The judge said he was opposed to the doctrine proposed; but, for the sake of the cause in hand, he would cheerfully risk his "toes." And so the Abolitionists were accommodated: Mr. Lincoln quietly made the pledge, and they voted for him.