Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
Thus Lincoln's advent in the Ohio campaign attracted much more than
usual notice. He made but two speeches, one at Columbus, and one at
Cincinnati, at each of which places Douglas had recently preceded him.
Lincoln's addresses not only brought him large and appreciative
audiences, but they obtained an unprecedented circulation in print. In
the main, they reproduced and tersely re-applied the ideas and
arguments developed in the Senatorial campaign in Illinois, adding,
however, searching comments on the newer positions and points to which
Douglas had since advanced. There is only space to insert a few
disconnected quotations:
Now, what is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty? It is as a
principle no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave
of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a
right to object....
If you will read the copyright essay, you will discover that Judge
Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies
and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question
in 1699, and continued from that time until the Revolution; and,
while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with
more or less violence ever since the Revolution....
Take these two things and consider them together; present the
question of planting a State with the institution of slavery by
the side of a question of who shall be Governor of Kansas for a
year or two, and is there a man here, is there a man on earth, who
would not say the governor question is the little one, and the
slavery question is the great one? I ask any honest Democrat if
the small, the local, the trivial and temporary question is not,
Who shall be governor? while the durable, the important, and the
mischievous one is, Shall this soil be planted with slavery? This
is an idea, I suppose, which has arisen in Judge Douglas's mind
from his peculiar structure. I suppose the institution of slavery
really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash
upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else's back
does not hurt him....
The Dred Scott decision expressly gives every citizen of the
United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States
Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that
the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the
Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the
trash, the words, the collateral matter was cleared away from it,
all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity; no
less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it
has a lawful right to be....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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