Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United StatesCrosby, Frank
History
Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States
Crosby, Frank
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865
“I begin with Utah. If it prove to be true, as is probable, that
the people of Utah are in open rebellion against the United States,
then Judge Douglas is in favor of repealing their territorial
organization, and attaching them to the adjoining States for
judicial purposes. I say, too, if they are in rebellion, they ought
to be somehow coerced to obedience; and I am not now prepared to
admit or deny, that the Judge’s mode of coercing them is not as
good as any. The Republicans can fall in with it, without taking
back any thing they have ever said. To be sure, it would be a
considerable backing down by Judge Douglas, from his much vaunted
doctrine of self-government for the territories; but this is only
additional proof of what was very plain from the beginning, that
that doctrine was a mere deceitful pretence for the benefit of
slavery. Those who could not see that much in the Nebraska act
itself, which forced Governors, and Secretaries, and Judges on the
people of the territories, without their choice or consent, could
not be made to see, though one should rise from the dead.
“But in all this, it is very plain the Judge evades the only
question the Republicans have ever pressed upon the Democracy in
regard to Utah. That question the Judge well knew to be this: ‘If
the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State Constitution
tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union?’
There is nothing in the United States Constitution or law against
polygamy; and why is it not a part of the Judge’s ‘sacred right of
self-government’ for the people to have it, or rather to keep it,
if they choose? These questions, so far as I know, the Judge never
answers. It might involve the Democracy to answer them either way
and they go unanswered.
“As to Kansas. The substance of the Judge’s speech on Kansas, is
an effort to put the Free State men in the wrong for not voting
at the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention. He
says: ‘There is every reason to hope and believe that the law will
be fairly interpreted and impartially executed, so as to insure
to every bona fide inhabitant the free and quiet exercise of the
elective franchise.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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