and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Here we have a clear note of that individual style which Lincoln's remarkable experience as a writer and public speaker was gradually fashioning. Spiritually, he was yet to be perfected through suffering. But his mind had already stood the stiff tests of courage and sympathy, of severe study and patience, of faith in the essential nobility and aspiration of human nature. The individuality of that style likewise was yet to be perfected. His experience was to be extended and his mind mellowed by a crisis far more vast and refining than lay in the intellectual adventure with Stephen A. Douglas. His prose had already felt, at points in his recent development, the heart-borne elevation which was to sustain and distinguish the Gettysburg Address, and which culminated in the music of that "sacred poem" which we know as the Second Inaugural.1

I Carl Schurz spoke of Lincoln's Second Inaugural as a "sacred poem," in his essay, "Abraham Lincoln."

CHAPTER VI

EAST AND WEST MEET AT COOPER INSTITUTE

The great difference between a real statesman and the pretender is, that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts on expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for immortality.—Burke.

By 1859, when Lincoln and Douglas participated in the Ohio campaign, the feeling between the North and South had become perilously unfriendly. Douglas was fast losing the support of the Southern Democrats. Jefferson Davis, typical of Southern political sentiment, openly broke with him in the Senate, and contemplated a movement of independence for the States of his section.1 A schism in the Democratic party was inevitable. Both Davis and Alexander H. Stephens were favorable to the reviving of the African slave-trade, prohibited by Congress in 1818 and made a piracy two years later. President Buchanan inclined to the side of the slaveholding statesmen; or, perhaps, through the lack of personal strength and a policy of his own, de

I See Rhodes, "History of the United States, from the Compromise of 1850," II., chap. x, for a full exposition of this period.

ferred to their views.1 Sectionalism, menacing and defiant, was rapidly overwhelming statesmanship in Congress.

For want of a dominant mind and personality in control, the federal government was drifting before the gathering storm of disunion. The John Brown raid deepened the feeling of hostility. The press of the land was arrayed on one side or the other in the impending cleavage over slavery. The church was soon to be riven; and scholarship and public opinion throughout the country, violently disturbed by the time-worn contention, were settling down to a definite and irrevocable party alignment destined to be made the immediate occasion of secession.

As the old-line Democracy divided, the Republican party consolidated under the impulse of new leadership. Seward in the East and Lincoln in the West were its ablest interpreters. Of the two, Seward was regarded both in the North and the South as the probable Republican nominee for President. Davis had called him "the master mind" of his party. His speech at Rochester on the "irrepressible conflict" had declared that the United States must become "either entirely a slave-holding nation 2 Ibid., p. 345.

I Ibid., pp. 349-350, 372.

This was the

or entirely a free-labor nation." 1 Lincoln doctrine in the Springfield speech of the same year, 1858. Each of the men had worked out the doctrine independently. Seward was openly a candidate for the honor. Lincoln had said he would support any good man, North or South, assuredly loyal to Republican principles. He wrote that he felt kindly to Chase, and further: "I must say I do not think myself fit for the presidency." Later he wrote (December 9, 1859): "You know I am pledged to not enter a struggle with him [Trumbull] for the seat in the Senate now occupied by him; and yet I would rather have a full term in the Senate than in the presidency.'

"3

"2

I During Lincoln's speech at Cincinnati in September, 1859, he quoted the phrase "irrepressible conflict." A voice in the audience intimated that the phrase was original with him, not with Seward. Lincoln replied: "Neither I, nor Seward, nor Hickman, is entitled to the enviable or unenviable distinction of having first expressed that idea. That same idea was expressed by the Richmond Enquirer in Virginia, in 1856, quite two years before it was expressed by the first of us.' He referred to the Enquirer and its editor, Roger A. Pryor, again, in the same connection, in his speech at New Haven, in March, 1860.

2 Letter to Samuel Galloway, July 28, 1859. 3 Letter to N. B. Judd, December 9, 1859.

On April 16, Lincoln had written to T. J. Pickett, of Rock Island, a newspaper friend who wished to announce his name for the Presidency, as follows: "As to the other matter you kindly mention, I must in candor say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency. I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made. Let this be considered confidential."

Yet Lincoln was already being seriously thought of in connection with the Republican nomination of 1860 by party leaders, particularly in 'his own State. He had added to his reputation in Ohio, where Chase was the leading party man. In the closing month of 1859, in response to solicitations, he gave a number of addresses at different points in Kansas. Only fragments of these addresses survive, but they are full enough to afford a clear indication of what he said. His Kansas speeches interpreted Douglas's popular sovereignty thus: "If one man would enslave another, neither that other nor any third man has a right to object." He followed up Douglas's article in "Harper's Magazine," as at Columbus; he defined the Republican policy as opposed to the further spread of slavery and to the revival of African slave-trade. "Douglas's position," he argued, "leads to the nationalization of slavery as surely as does that of Jeff Davis and Mason of Virginia. The two positions are but slightly different roads to the same place—with this difference, that the nationalization of slavery can be reached by Douglas's route, and never can be by the other." He urged party leaders to organize: "hold conventions, select candidates, and carry elections. At every step we must be true to the main