not mean negroes at all; and when "all men" were spoken of negroes were not included?

I am satisfied that five years ago that proposition was not put upon paper by any living being anywhere. I have been unable at any time to find a man in any audience who would declare that he had ever known of anybody saying so five years ago. But last year there was not a Douglas popular sovereign in Illinois who did not say it. Is there one in Ohio but declares his firm belief that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes at all? I do not know how this is; I have not been here much; but I presume you are very much alike everywhere. Then I suppose that all now express the belief that the Declaration of Independence never did mean negroes. I call upon one of them to say that he said it five years ago.

If you think that now, and did not think it then, the next thing that strikes me is to remark that there has been a change wrought in you, and a very significant change it is, being no less than changing the negro, in your estimation, from the rank of a man to that of a brute. They are taking him down and placing him, when spoken of, among reptiles and crocodiles, as Judge Douglas himself expresses it.

Is not this change wrought in your minds a very important. change? Public opinion in this country is every thing. In a nation like ours, this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already brought a change in the public mind to the extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it.

Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on, layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for all these things, and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade, revived with all its horrors, a slave code enforced in our Territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North. This, I must say, is but carrying out those words prophetically spoken by Mr. Clay, many, many years ago I believe more than thirty years - when he told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and

muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate the love of liberty; but until they did these things, and others eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to ultimate emancipation.

I ask attention to the fact that in a pre-eminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of the Ohio Republicans, or Democrats, if there be any present, the serious consideration of this fact, that there is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject. With this, my friends, I bid you adieu.

The next morning the opposing newspapers gave their readers the following reports of the meeting:

SPEECH OF MR. LINCOLN
OF ILLINOIS

(Ohio State Journal)

We give this morning a full report of the speech of Mr. Lincoln, yesterday. It was made on the eastern terrace of the State House, the same place where Douglas made his; but, Mr. Lincoln being in the hands of friends, who wished to hear instead of suppress him, the arrangement was different. Instead of being partially extinguished with a brown sheeting canopy, and surrounded with half a dozen benches on which a score or two of men standing could hide him from the audience, and then being pitted against the immense stone wall of the State House, as Douglas was, Mr. Lincoln occupied a stand placed against the State House, and was easily heard all over the terrace. Yesterday being the great day of the county fair that performance prevented so large an audience as would have otherwise attended.

It is unnecessary for us to comment on the speech, as no one who

ABE LINCOLN IN COLUMBUS

(Ohio Statesman)

The Young Men's Republican Club must have been mortified at the very meagre audience in attendance at the Lincoln meeting held yesterday afternoon on the eastern terrace of the State House. The Douglas meeting on Wednesday week at the same place could well have spared a number of men equal to that which heard Lincoln on yesterday, and not missed them from the assemblage. The meeting was indeed a "beggarly account of empty boxes," and the speaker disappointed all who heard him. We should be content to have Mr. Lincoln speak on the eastern terrace every day from this time until the election. He is not an orator. can hardly be classed as a third rate debater. The most of his time was taken up in what he supposed to be a review of Douglas' Popular Sovereignty doctrine, and the article in Harper's on that subject. He is opposed to the principle of leaving to the people of the territories the right to mould their institutions

He

Here is another description giving the observations of a young lady of sixteen, after sixty-two years had passed:

It was my happy privilege, in company with my father and mother, to hear the speech of Mr. Douglas and the reply of Mr. Lincoln, both delivered to small audiences on two somber autumn

Mrs. Alice Corner Brown in History of Columbus, by Osman C. Hooper, p. 44.

afternoons. Near the northeast corner of the ten acre State House square a steam engine was boring an artesian well. It was not noisy, but the sounds were regular and insistent; and, after speaking a few minutes, Mr. Douglas, looking very weary and annoyed, stopped, saying, "I can't speak against a steam engine." As soon as word could reach the engine driver, the boring ceased and the speech went on. Appeal, not argument; entreaty to change conditions, not recognition of the great trend of events characterized his address. A perfunctory round of applause without enthusiasm punctuated its close, and silently the two hundred men who had stood on the ground throughout the harangue dispersed, seemingly not converted to the plan of voting down slavery in the territories.

Mr. Lincoln came and was apparently introduced to the same audience. There were seated on the east terrace about a score of women, when there came from the Capitol behind the group, a tall, sad-eyed, earnest, grave man. Taking up the assumptions of his rival, he showed the fallacy of the local option of dealing with the extension of slavery into the territories. He indulged in no jokes, no witticisms. The crisis was too real and too awfully pregnant with fate. The impression left on the mind by the address was the vast import of events which no trifling or jugglery or vainglorious and boastful pro-slavery or antislavery men could delude the Nation into excusing, viz.; the invasion of free territory by armed men and the bloody encounters which followed.

At the close of Mr. Lincoln's address, the ladies who had been seated at his right were presented to him. I did not know that I was shaking hands with the next President of the United States, the hero and martyr of the coming crisis in our history.

The next day at Dayton, while waiting for the Cincinnati train, in response to previous arrangements, Lincoln spoke; his address covered similar points to those in his speech at Cincinnati that evening. It was in relation to the influence of the Ordinance of 1787 in excluding slavery from Ohio and other States of the West and Northwest. For the historical information it contained, as well as for its repudiation of the oftrepeated declaration of Senator Douglas, the reader is

referred to Lincoln's Cincinnati speech, which he will find in the next chapter.

The following from the Weekly Dayton Journal of September 20, describes the meeting:

The announcement that Mr. Lincoln "Old Abe," as he is familiarly called by the "Suckers" with whom he lives, would speak at the Court House on Saturday afternoon, brought a large crowd of people to the appointed place, and for nearly two hours the speaker was listened to with the utmost attention. Mr. Lincoln is one of the "self-made” men having, without the advantages of education, risen to the proud pre-eminence which he now occupies in his own State and in the United States.

He is remarkable for vigor of intellect, clearness of perception, and power of argumentation, and for fairness and honesty in the presentation of facts. Every man who listened to Mr. Lincoln on Saturday was impressed with the manner as well as the matter of speech, abounding as it did in valuable historical information and in great political truths.

Mr. Lincoln directed the greater part of his speech to demonstrate the falsity of the assumption contained in the question in Senator Douglas' magazine essay, by which he seeks to make the framers of this government consider slavery a desirable feature in the material out of which the Union was formed.

Mr. Lincoln met this assumption by a condensed statement of the facts in the history of the government, going to show that the framers of the government found slavery existing when the constitution was formed, and got along with it as well as they could in accomplishing the Union of the States, contemplating and expecting the advent of the period when slavery in the United States should no longer exist.

He referred to the limitation of the time for the continuance of the slave trade, by which the supply of slaves should be cut off to the fact that the word slave does not occur in the constitution, for the reason given at the period of its formation, that when, in after times, slavery should cease to exist, no one should know from the language of the constitution itself, that slavery had ever existed in the United States. We cannot attempt to follow Mr. Lincoln in his statement of facts and argument in exposing the false assumption of Senator Douglas, but Mr. Lincoln showed conclusively that instead of desiring that we should have a Union made up of free and slave States, as a sort of happy admixture of political elements, the framers of our government regarded the removal of slavery as only a ques