and those of the old-time Democrats that his place as Senator was sustained. As Douglas began to realize this change in sentiment he lost his splendid confidence and his manners. His one name for Lincoln became "Black Republican," so that more than one audience asked him to change the colour and "make it a little brown," for Lincoln was not at all willing to accept the epithet proudly.

Douglas was being harassed on all sides by his Freeport Doctrine, the name given to his unfriendly legislation argument, and by the fact that he was spending more money than he could afford. His debt in that campaign amounted to $90,000. Besides, he was being unmercifully attacked by the Buchanan Administration and the other" Lecomptonites," who were trying to defeat him as much as Lincoln, sending out canards that he was a slave-holder and that he maltreated his slaves in a disgraceful manner. Douglas accused Lincoln of being in collusion with the "Lecomptonites" to accomplish his ruin, but although he disclaimed any such connection, which on the face of it was an impossibility, he was not at all displeased at the bickering in the Democratic camp, and said, "Go it, husband-go it, bear!"

At Alton, where the last debate was held, Lincoln was joined by his wife. Evidently she had not much faith in the success of his radicalism, for he asked his friend, Koerner, "to tell Mary what he thought of our chances. She is rather dispirited." The chances were pretty even. If Lincoln was sectional, Douglas, with his Freeport Doctrine, had no section at all left to him. As Lincoln said, "He would not pass as coin south of the Ohio."

Lincoln spoke in thirty-nine places besides the seven debates, carrying on the campaign in his simple way, finding rest as well as he could curled up on miserable railway seats, wrapped in his grey shawl. Though he won the popular vote, he lost in the Senatorial contest, and he felt very much, he said, like the boy that stumped his toe. "It hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry." On the whole, he wrote, he was glad he had made the race, for it gave him a hearing "on the great and durable question of the age, which I would have had in no other way, and although 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 have gone."

CHAPTER VII

THE REPUBLICAN VICTORY

INCOLN'S defeat in the Senatorial contest of 1858 left him for the moment rudderless. The financial strain of the campaign, though the actual expenses were only $1000, was embarrassing, for he had no outside income except what he made from the law, which Herndon said never amounted to more than $3000 a year. His only property was some wild lands in Indiana, which he had received from his services in the Black Hawk War. His law practice had been neglected, and he made one of his many pathetic attempts to escape from it by becoming a public lecturer. He wrote a paper on inventions, which he read several times, but which received very little notice. His forte lay in politics.

The Senatorial contest in Illinois had made him a national figure, due more, perhaps at the time, to the importance of his opponent than to the doctrines he expressed. He became recognized as the rival of Douglas. When Douglas was called by the Democrats to canvass for the Gubernatorial election in Ohio, Lincoln was called for the same purpose by the Republicans. He used the arguments he made the year before in Illinois: that slavery was a moral wrong, and that it was not in the meaning of the framers of the Government that it should be extended. Douglas, try as he would to change the theme from slavery to

the principles of popular sovereignty, was forced back into a discussion of slavery. To the emigrants from Ireland or Germany the abstract rights of the settler to form his own form of government was not as important as the concrete right that it should already be free and open for themselves and their families coming later. In this campaign Ohio went Republican by a good majority.

Lincoln was being asked to speak for the Republicans as far west as Kansas and Minnesota, and his friends in Illinois began planning to offer his name for the Presidential Convention of 1860. The Illinois State Committee saw to it, through editorials in the daily papers, that the public opinion in his favour should be gathered and intensified.

Lincoln was aware of these political manoeuvres and was not entirely averse to them. Reduced railway fares to the seat of the Convention were initiated and newspaper men were conciliated. To a politician Lincoln wrote: "As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I cannot enter the ring on a money basisfirst, because in the main it is wrong; and secondly, I have not and cannot get the money. I say in the main the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects in a political contest the use of same is both right and indispensable. With me, as with yourself, this long struggle has been one of great pecuniary loss. I now distinctly say this: If you should be appointed a delegate to Chicago, I will furnish $100 to bear the expenses of the trip."

Lincoln's attitude towards his candidacy was expressed in a letter to his friend: "I am not in a position

where it would hurt much for me not to be nominated on the national ticket, but I am where it would hurt some for me not to get the Illinois delegates."

The Republicans of the East, who had a candidate of their own, Wm. H. Seward, upon whom they were all, with the exception of Greeley, pretty much agreed, invited Lincoln to speak in New York, to get a closer view of this new figure in American politics. It was taken for granted that the second place on the ticket was to go to the West. Seward, who had expressed himself on the irrepressible conflict, even before Lincoln had made his "house divided against itself " speech, was considered much more radical on the slavery question than Lincoln. The South denounced him for intending to make war upon them not only because of his irrepressible conflict argument, but also because he had said that there was a "higher law" than the Constitution which dedicated the land to freedom. To counteract this "higher law" doctrine they were planning to give the Vice-Presidential place to a man who would not be offensive to the more conservative elements, and Lincoln was the most likely man for the place. Time and again he had reiterated that he believed in the Constitution, that he would admit new slave states and that he would enforce a Fugitive Slave Law.

Lincoln accepted the invitation to speak in New York, and Herndon says it was he who suggested that he speak on politics. Surely Lincoln was not planning to give his address on inventions! At any rate he took Herndon's advice and spoke on the intentions of the framers of the Constitution on the matter of slavery.