The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (72 page)

I do not know how such an argument may strike a popular assembly like this, but I defy anybody to go before a body of men whose minds are educated to estimating evidence and reasoning, and show that there is an iota of difference between the constitutional right to reclaim a fugitive, and the constitutional right to hold a slave, in a Territory, provided this Dred Scott decision is correct. I defy any man to make an argument that will justify unfriendly legislation to deprive a slaveholder of his right to hold his slave in a Territory, that will not equally, in all its length, breadth, and thickness, furnish an argument for nullifying the fugitive-slave law. Why, there is not such an Abolitionist in the nation as Douglas, after all.

Again and again, whispered charges were made that Lincoln had favored the Know-Nothing party. Such charges always annoyed him, and he went out of his way to refute them.

Springfield, October 30, 1858

D
EAR
S
IR
: I understand the story is still being told and insisted upon that I have been a Know-Nothing. I repeat what I stated in a public speech at Meredosia, that I am not, nor ever have been, connected with the party called the Know-Nothing party, or party calling themselves the American party. Certainly no man of truth, and I believe no man of good character for truth, can be found to say on his own knowledge that I ever was connected with that party.

On this day a huge Republican rally, the last of the campaign, was held in Springfield. Lincoln addressed the crowd during the afternoon, and had difficulty in speaking to an audience that was more interested in celebrating for celebration’s sake than in hearing him speak. He had spent months of effort, traveled hundreds of miles and spoken scores of times in the Senatorial campaign; the debates with Douglas were finished; the excitement of battle was over—he had only to look forward to the results of the election. The election was only three days away, and these are Lincoln’s final words to a public audience before the defeat that was to overtake him at the polls.

October 30, 1858

M
Y FRIENDS
, today closes the discussions of this canvass. The planting and the culture are over; and there remains but the preparation, and the harvest.

I stand here surrounded by friends—some
political, all personal
friends, I trust. May I be indulged, in this closing scene, to say a few words of myself. I have borne a laborious, and, in some respects to myself, a painful part in the contest. Through all, I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the constitution. The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with their institution in the states, I have constantly denied. In resisting the spread of slavery to new territory, and with that, what appears to me to be a tendency to subvert the first principle of free government itself my whole effort has consisted. To the best of my judgment I have labored
for
, and not
against
the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us, is the difference of circumstances.

I have meant to assail the motives of no party, or individual; and if I have, in any instance (of which I am not conscious) departed from my purpose, I regret it.

I have said that in some respects the contest has been painful to me. Myself, and those with whom I act have been constantly accused of a purpose to destroy the Union; and bespattered with every imaginable odious epithet; and some who were friends, as it were but yesterday have made themselves most active in this. I have cultivated patience, and made no attempt at a retort.

Ambition has been ascribed to me. God knows how sincerely I prayed from the first that this field of ambition might not be opened. I claim no insensibility to political honors; but today could the Missouri restriction be restored, and the whole slavery question be replaced on the old ground of “toleration” by
necessity
where it exists, with unyielding hostility to the spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration, gladly
agree, that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I never
in
, an office, so long as we both or either, live.

Nothing is so painful as to have to pay the expenses of a campaign that has been a failure. Lincoln was not elected, but two weeks after election day, N. B. Judd, chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, was on his heels for a contribution toward paying the expenses of his canvass. Lincoln had spent months of hard work in the political field to the neglect of his law practice; he was short of funds—nevertheless he pledges more money to cover the expenses incurred by the party.

Springfield, November 16, 1858

D
EAR
S
IR
: Yours of the 15th is just received. I wrote you the same day. As to the pecuniary matter, I am willing to pay according to my ability; but I am the poorest hand living to get others to pay.

I have been on expenses so long without earning anything that I am absolutely without money now for even household purposes. Still, if you can put in two hundred and fifty dollars for me toward discharging the debt of the committee, I will allow it when you and I settle the private matter between us.

This, with what I have already paid, and with an outstanding note of mine, will exceed my subscription of five hundred dollars. This, too, is exclusive of my ordinary expenses during the campaign, all of which being added to my loss of time and business, bears pretty heavily upon one no better off in [this] world’s goods than I; but as I had the post of honor, it is not for me to be over nice. You are feeling badly—“And this too shall pass away,” never fear.

Lincoln writes to the man who had suggested to him the famous second question of the Freeport debate. He predicts that “another explosion will soon.come.”

Springfield, November 19, 1858

D
EAR
S
IR
: Yours of the 13th was received some days ago. The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. 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. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come.

This is the Doctor Henry for whom Lincoln tried to get a Post-mastership in 1841, when he wanted to keep a friendly physician near him because of the state of his mind after his break with Mary Todd. Part of this letter has been destroyed.

Springfield, November 19, 1858

A
S A
general rule, out of Sangamon as well as in it, much of the plain old Democracy is with us, while nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking Whiggery is against us. I don’t mean nearly all the Old Whig party, but nearly all of the nice exclusive sort. And why not? There has been nothing in politics since the Revolution so congenial to their nature as the present position of the great Democratic party.

I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on
the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.

Again Lincoln writes to state his position on the résults of his struggle with Douglas. This letter is an almost exact paraphrase of his letter to Asbury on November 19.

Springfield, November 26, 1858

M
Y
D
EAR
S
IR
: Your kind letter with enclosure is received, and for which I thank you. It being my own judgment that the fight must go on, it affords me great pleasure to learn that our friends are nowhere dispirited.

There will be another “blow up” in the democracy. Douglas managed to be supported both as the best instrument to
break down
, and to
up-hold
the slave power. No ingenuity can keep this deception—this double position—up a great while.

Lincoln writes an optimistic letter to an old friend and political supporter to forecast that “we shall beat them in the long run.”

Springfield, December 12, 1858

M
Y
D
EAR
S
IR
: I expect the result of the election went hard with you. So it did with me, too, perhaps not quite so hard as you may have supposed. I have an abiding faith that we
shall beat them in the long run. Step by step the objects of the leaders will become too plain for the people to stand them. I write merely to let you know that I am neither dead nor dying. Please give my respects to your good family, and all inquiring friends.

Pickett was a newspaper editor in Rock Island, Ill., who had invited Lincoln to deliver a lecture on “Inventions and Discoveries” in that city. In the last sentence Lincoln says that he does not consider himself fit for the Presidency. Two years later, less one day, he was inaugurated.

Springfield, March 5, 1859

M
Y
D
EAR
S
IR
: Yours of the 2nd inst. inviting me to deliver my lecture on “Inventions” in Rock Island, is at hand and I regret to be unable, from press of business to comply therewith.

In regard to the other matter you speak of, I beg that you will not give it a further mention. Seriously, I do not think I am fit for the Presidency.

Lincoln was again invited to lecture, this time in Boston. Again he declined. He had been asked to speak in honor of Thomas Jefferson. He writes here a careful letter on Jefferson that was doubtless intended to be read at the Boston meeting. In it he makes the point that the Republicans, and not the Democrats, had become the spiritual heirs of Jefferson. He also shows how political parties, over a course of time, can switch their points of views so completely that they take each other’s former position.

Springfield, Ill., April 6, 1859

G
ENTLEMEN
: Your kind note inviting me to attend a festival in Boston, on the 28th instant, in honor of the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. My engagements are such that I cannot attend.

Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago two great political parties were first formed in this country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them and Boston the headquarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his birthday in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere.

Remembering, too, that the Jefferson party was formed upon its supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, and assuming that the so-called Democracy of today are the Jefferson, and their opponents the anti-Jefferson, partly, it will be equally interesting to note how completely the two have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property; Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

I remember being once much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engaged in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men.

But, soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies.” And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting [of] the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man, who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln writes to the man who was to become his Secretary of the Treasury and his most outspoken opponent in his own Cabinet. Chase, at this time, was the Republican leader of Ohio. The Fugitive Slave Law was the most bitterly opposed law in the North.
Abolitionists were eager to get rid of it; most of them openly flouted it. Few people in the North would defend it. Conservatives like Lincoln, however, were willing to let it stand in order to preserve peace.