CHAP. IX. inevitably beaten two years hence. Take this into Lincoln to serious consideration."

Judd, Nov.

15, 1858.

Ibid., Nov. 16, 1858.

On the following day he received from Mr. Judd a letter informing him that the funds subscribed for the State Central Committee did not suffice to pay all the election bills, and asking his help to raise additional contributions. To this appeal Lincoln replied: "Yours of the 15th is just received. I wrote you the same day. As to the pecuniary matter, I am willing to pay according to my ability, but I am the poorest hand living to get others to pay. I have been on expenses so long without earning anything that I am absolutely without money now for even household purposes. Still, if you can put in $250 for me towards discharging the debt of the committee, I will allow it when you and I settle the private matter between us. This, with what I have already paid, and with an outstanding note of mine, will exceed my subscription of $500. This, too, is exclusive of my ordinary expenses during the campaign, all which being added to my loss of time and business, bears pretty heavily upon one no better off in world's goods than I; but as I had the post of honor, it is not for me to be over-nice. You are feeling badly -'And this too shall pass away. Never fear."

The sting of personal defeat is painful to most men, and doubtless it was so to Lincoln. Yet he regarded the passing struggle as something more than a mere scramble for office, and drew from it. the consolation which all earnest workers feel in the consciousness of a task well done. Thus he wrote to a friend on November 19: "You doubtless have seen ere this the result of the election

here. Of course I wished, but I did not much expect, a better result. . . I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of Lincoln to civil liberty long after I am gone."

To these one other letter may be added, showing his never-failing faith in the political future. To a personal friend in Quincy, Illinois, who had watched the campaign with unusual attention, Lincoln wrote that same day: "Yours of the 13th was received some days ago. The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest, both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest.

Dr. Henry, Nov. 19, 1858. MS.

No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon Lincoln to come."

Douglas was also greatly exhausted by the wearing labors of the campaign; but he had the notable triumph of an assured reëlection to the Senate and the congratulations of his enthusiastic friends to sustain and refresh him. Being an indefatigable worker, he was already organizing a new and more ambitious effort. Three weeks after election he started on a brief tour to the Southern States, making speeches at Memphis and New Orleans, of which further mention will be made in the next chapter. Perhaps he deemed it wise not to proceed immediately to Washington, where Congress con

Asbury, November

19, 1858.

1858.

CHAP. IX. Vened on the first Monday of December, and thus to avoid a direct continuance of his battle with the Buchanan Administration. If so, the device proved ineffectual. The President and his partisans were determined to put the author of the "Freeport doctrine" under public ban, and to that end, when Congress organized, one of the first acts of the Senate majority was to depose Douglas from his place as chairman of the Committee on Territories, which he had held in that body for eleven years.

WH

CHAPTER X

LINCOLN'S OHIO SPEECHES

́HEN Lincoln, in opening the Senatorial campaign of Illinois, declared that the Republican cause must be intrusted to its own undoubted friends "who do care for the result," he displayed a much better understanding of the character and aims of his opponent than those who, not so well informed, desired the adoption of a different course. Had the wishes of Greeley and others prevailed, had Douglas been adopted by the Illinois Republicans, the party would have found itself in a fatal dilemma. No sooner was the campaign closed than Douglas, having entered on his tour through the South, began making speeches, apparently designed to pave his way to a nomination for President by the next Democratic National Convention. Realizing that he had lost ground by his antiLecomptonism, and especially by his Freeport doctrine, and having felt in the late campaign the hostility of the Buchanan Administration, he now sought to recover prestige by publishing more advanced opinions indirectly sustaining and defending slavery.

Hitherto he had declared he did not care whether slavery was voted down or voted up. He had said he would not argue the question whether slavery

CHAP. X.

CHAP. X.

was right or wrong. He had adopted Taney's assertion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence. He had asserted that uniformity was impossible, but that freedom and slavery might abide together forever. But now that the election was over and a new term in the Senate secure, he was ready to conciliate pro-slavery opinion with stronger expressions. Hence, in a speech at Memphis, he cunningly linked together in argument unfriendly legislation, slavery, and annexation. He said: "Whenever a Territory has a climate, soil, and production making it the interest of the inhabitants to encourage slave property, they will pass a slave code."

Wherever these preclude the possibility of slavery being profitable, they will not permit it. On the sugar plantations of Louisiana it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the crocodile. He would say that between the negro and the crocodile, he took the side of the negro; but between the negro and the white man, he would go for the white man. The Almighty has drawn the line on this continent, on the one side of which the soil must be cultivated by slave labor; on the other by white labor. That line did not run on 36° and 30' [the Missouri Compromise line], for 36° and 30′ runs over mountains and through valleys. But this slave line, he said, meanders in the sugar-fields and plantations of the South, and the people living in their different localities and in the Territories must determine for themselves whether their "middle bed" is best adapted to slavery or free labor.