The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative And Descriptive Biography With Pen-Pictures And Personal; Recollections By Those Who Knew HimBrowne, Francis F. (Francis Fisher)
History
The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative And Descriptive Biography With Pen-Pictures And Personal; Recollections By Those Who Knew Him
Browne, Francis F. (Francis Fisher)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
let it remain where the fathers of the Government originally
placed it.
In these debates Lincoln often seemed like one transfigured--carried
away by his own eloquence and the force of his conviction. He said to a
friend during the canvass: "Sometimes, in the excitement of speaking, I
seem to see the end of slavery. I feel that the time is soon coming when
the sun shall shine, the rain shall fall, on no man who shall go forth
to unrequited toil.... How this will come, when it will come, by whom it
will come, I cannot tell;--but that time will surely come." Again, at
the first encounter at Alton, he uttered these pregnant sentences:
On this subject of treating slavery as a wrong, and limiting its
spread, let me say a word. Has anything ever threatened the
existence of this Union save and except this very institution of
slavery? What is it that we hold most dear among us? Our own
liberty and prosperity. What has ever threatened our liberty and
prosperity, save and except this institution of slavery? If this
is true, how do you propose to improve the condition of things by
enlarging slavery?--by spreading it out and making it bigger? You
may have a wen or cancer upon your person, and not be able to cut
it out lest you bleed, to death; but surely it is no way to cure
it to ingraft it and spread it over your whole body--that is no
proper way of treating what you regard a wrong. This peaceful way
of dealing with it as a wrong--restricting the spread of it, and
not allowing it to go into new countries where it has not already
existed--that is the peaceful way, the old-fashioned way, the way
in which the fathers themselves set us the example. Is slavery
wrong? That is the real issue. That is the issue that will
continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas
and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They
are two principles that have stood face to face from the
beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is
the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of
kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it develops
itself. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work, and toil, and
earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes,
whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people
of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from
one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is
the same tyrannical principle.
On still another occasion he used these unmistakable words:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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