a meeting in the same place that evening of all the "friends of liberty," with a view to organizing the Republican party in Illinois, as it had already been organized in Wisconsin and Ohio. The scheme was to induce Lincoln to address them, and thus publicly to commit him as of their faith. But the astute Herndon, though in their counsels and as radical as any of them, was more of a politician, and knew the danger to Lincoln of consorting just then with Abolitionists. So he hunted up his partner and said: "Go home at once! Take Bob with you and drive somewhere in the country, and stay till this thing is over." Lincoln, always alert and politic, did take Bob in his buggy and drove to Tazewell County, where Judge Davis was holding court. Thus he escaped the dilemma, since either joining, or refusing to join, the Abolitionists would have been perilous in view of the approaching contest for the Senatorship.

Herndon, however, had difficulty in explaining to some of his fellow radicals why his partner had such urgent business in Tazewell County. Among these was Mr. Z. Eastman, editor of the Western Citizen an Abolitionist paper

who remained for some time uncertain as to the real position of Lincoln on the slavery question.1 But Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding- two ministers with hearts aflame were so sure of Lincoln that they put his name on a list of members of a Republican State Committee without consulting him. Some time later Lincoln received a notice from

1 Later Mr. Eastman visited Springfield and had an interview with Herndon the mediator between Lincoln and the radicals in order to assure himself and his friends as to Lincoln's real views. He reports Herndon as saying: "Lincoln has been an attentive reader of your paper for years; he believes in the Declaration of Independence, and...is well posted. That he might get all sides of the question, I take Garrison's Liberator, and he takes the National Era, and the Western Citizen. Although he does not say much, you may depend on it, Mr. Lincoln is all right; when it becomes necessary, he will speak so that he will be understood." At the Bloomington convention, May 29, 1856, he did speak in no uncertain sound. "After that," adds Mr. Eastman, "there was no longer any opposition to Lincoln from the most radical of the Abolitionists."—"Anti-Slavery Agitation in Illinois." in Blanchard's History of Illinois, p. 671 (Old Edition).

Codding to attend a meeting of the committee, and replied by asking why his name had been used without his consent.1 He was anxious, however, that his radical friends should understand his position, which was that when he refused to go faster than a certain pace it was with a view to final victory, not to surrender. From first to last he was for the ultimate extinction of slavery, and he waited only for means. What reply Codding made, if any, is not known; but we know that Lovejoy, when elected to the Legislature, voted for Lincoln for Senator.

Twelve days after the encounter during the State Fair the two rivals met in joint debate at Peoria, where Douglas spoke for more than three hours in presenting his side of the case. He followed the outline of his Springfield address, ringing the changes on "popular sovereignty," and approaching dangerously near to bathos when at the close, as a bait for Whig votes, he pictured himself as standing beside the death-bed of Webster and receiving the patriotic mantle of that ascending statesman. To those who recalled how he had fought that giant with all the weapons of partisan warfare, such an appeal must have been amusing. Those were the days when the interest of audiences was equal to the endurance of orators, and when it came Lincoln's turn to be heard it was supper time. Whereupon he told the people that his argument would not be less lengthy, and asked them to repair to their

1 In 1858, in the joint debate in Ottawa, Douglas read what pur. ported to be a resolution passed by this "Black Republican" convention of 1854, demanding the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, and with an air of triumph applied it as a blister to Lincoln, whose name was found on the list of committeemen. It turned out, however, that his friend C. H. Lanphier, of the State Register, who had furnished the information, had given him a resolution passed by a small convention in Kane County. The Springfield resolution contained no such demand. Lincoln, who found out the truth and applied the blister to Douglas at Freeport, always believed that Mr. Lanphier had substituted the bogus resolution to help T. L. Harris in his race for Congress against Richard Yates, and had forgotten the circumstance. It is not necessary to charge Mr. Lanphier with bad faith in this instance. Nor was Douglas a party to the trick, though, as the sequel showed, he was a victim of it. - Lincoln-Douglas Debates, pp. 65-73, 87-93 (1860).

provision baskets and return at seven, announcing that Senator Douglas was to reply. After a scene which resembled a picnic, the audience re-assembled, and he repeated the substance of his Springfield effort, but in an improved form, both as to compactness of argument and austerity of style. In later years he regarded his Peoria address as in some respects the ablest he had ever made, and since he wrote it out entirely from memory, for he did not use notes and published it in successive numbers of the Sangamon Journal, it can be read to this day. While it contained a few of the catch phrases which in his later speeches became bywords of popular use, it was by far the most clear-cut and masterly forensic utterance of that year, if not of the whole slavery debate.

Many elements entered into the speech to make it notable, one of which was the spirit of sympathy and justice shown towards the people of the South, against whom Lincoln had no unkindly feeling. Long usage and interest, he knew, had influenced their judgment, just as like usage and interest would have influenced the judgment of the people of the North. He did not hold them solely responsible for slavery, nor did he suggest any plan whereby they might rid themselves of it, but he was emphatic in his belief that, instead of becoming aggressive for its extension, they should by this time have devised some system of gradual emancipation. Equally emphatic was his plea for the humanity of the negro, for proof of which he appealed to the Southern people themselves, many of whom were restive under slavery and so tender-hearted that they must needs employ others to manage their slaves. If he was too politic to push this point to indiscreet length, he left no doubt as to his feeling that slavery was morally wrong, both to master and man, as well as to the nation. Indeed, just because it was a national sin - in which North and South were involved in a common historic guilt the whole Union was bound to protect the new Territories from infection by it. New Territories were held in national trust, not merely for the first settlers who might wish to carry slavery with them, but for the millions who would eventually settle or

be born there. Unsuited by climate and soil for slave-labor - which economic necessity had segregated to the South — those broad expanses must be kept as an asylum for the poor white people who wished to find homes where their labor would not be degraded by contact with slavery. The Nebraska Bill, so far from being a Union-saving measure, had already filled the nation with vehement antagonism which would only be intensified by further attempts to extend slavery. Actual events, then transpiring in Kansas, were heralds of civil strife, and with the abandonment of the spirit of mutual concession and compromise there was no hope of peace. He therefore urged that the Missouri Compromise be restored as a basis of negotiation between the sections. The speech was statesmanlike in its scope and grasp, incisive but dignified in language, though weakened somewhat at the close by too much attention to the quibbles of Douglas. As this was the first elaborate survey of the question by Lincoln that has come down to us, a few passages may illustrate its spirit and style: Before proceeding let me say that 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 among 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 who 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 ones go South and become most cruel slave-masters.

When the Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, 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 same. 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 with the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the 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. 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.

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the extension of slavery to new Territories. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? . . . The great majority, South as well as North, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the Southern people manifest, in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro. . . . And now why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the negro, and estimate him as only the equal of a hog?

The doctrine of self-government is right, absolutely and eternally right,- but it has no just application as here attempted. . But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government that is despotism. . that is despotism. . . . No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man's consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor, of American republicanism.

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 must have some 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 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.