INTRODUCTION

THE senatorial campaign of 1858 in Illinois derives its historical importance from the fact that its influence was decisive in determining the political crisis of 1860. Before the great series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas in that campaign, Abraham Lincoln was a figure of local significance. As a result of what was essentially his forensic victory in the struggle with Douglas, he came to share with William H. Seward the leadership of the national Republican party, and entered naturally upon the path that led to the presidency in 1860. Before that campaign, Douglas, whose equal as a parliamentary debater and party organizer American history has hardly produced, had been for eight years the most forceful leader of the Democratic party, and the most conspicuous figure in national politics. As a result of the debates with Lincoln, the support of the South, upon which he had need to depend for furtherance of his ambition to become president, was irreparably lost, and the great national party whose candidate he hoped to be was broken in twain. Beginning with this campaign the long struggle against slavery entered, therefore, upon its final phase. The

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ultimate leader in the struggle of a century to overthrow slavery had appeared.

The speeches comprising the body of this volume contain a full statement-perhaps the best statement of the slavery question as it appeared at that time to two classes of people: those who in varying degrees favored the institution of slavery, and those who, though they did not yet aim to exterminate slavery from the states in which it was rooted, were seeking to prevent its extension to soil upon which it was not yet established.

The fundamental issue of 1858 the right or wrong of slavery-in its broad and universal statement of moral principle needs little elucidation for the student of to-day. But the political aspects under which it presented itself at that time are less familiar, and along with the party politics and the personalities of the hour deserve explanation. It is the purpose of this introduction briefly to set forth the origin of the three kinds of issues which appear in the debates-questions of principle, questions of party politics, questions arising from attacks made by either candidate upon the political acts of the other; also to supplement this account with some portraiture of the debaters themselves as they appeared to those who listened, and to give a general description of the great contest which they waged.

The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 multiplied by fifty the amount of cotton which a single laborer could separate from the

cotton seed in a day's work. This single invention made possible an increase of one thousand fold in the annual production of cotton in the South between 1791 and 1860. Upon this economic basis the institution of slavery which, it had been confidently supposed by all statesmen, South as well as North, was in process of extinction, reared a more significant growth, and became a social and political factor of the most formidable magnitude. But for the cotton-gin Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky would have been reclaimed from slavery, and Mis-/ souri would never have had it. After 1793 the prosperity of the South was founded upon cotton, and cotton fostered slavery. "That slavery is a blessing and cotton is king were associated ideas, with which the Southern mind was imbued in the decade bebefore the war." 1

The moral sense of the evil of slavery awakened but slowly in the North, and the people of that section were little inclined to attack the institution except when the extension of slavery to new territory was involved. The early Abolitionists of the Garrisonian type-radicals who denounced the Constitution as "an agreement with Hell" because it temporized with slavery-were nearly as hateful to the average Northern mind as to the Southern ; nor did they ever become numerically representative of Northern opinion. The aggressive acts of practical Northern statesmen in opposition to

'James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States, Vol. i. p. 27.

slavery were limited to thwarting its growth. Before 1861 no Free-Soiler, no Republican ever, with the sanction of his party, maintained that under the Constitution of the United States there could be any interference from an external source with slavery in any state where it already existed. The aspect in which the slavery problem presented itself to the American people, therefore, throughout the long period from the admission of Missouri until the outbreak of the Civil War, was, whether slavery should be permitted to extend its sway into territory where it was not already a recognized institution. Chiefly the question was: Shall slavery be sanctioned in the National Territory and in the new states from time to time to be formed out of it?

Whether the admission of Missouri in 1820 was at stake, or the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, or the admission of California in 1850, or the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in the same year, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, or the Dred Scott decision, or the Lecompton Constitution proposed for Kansas in 1857; the broad outlines of the general problem remained the same.

Thoughtful men in the years before the great crisis grouped themselves upon this general question in ways which the party lines of any given time only imperfectly represented. First, there were the extreme radicals: on the side of the South they were the "Fire-eaters," who were willing to use any means to extend slavery; on the side of the

North they were the Abolitionists, who, with Garrison, believed slavery "a damning crime" with which no compromise was possible, and who proposed the immediate freedom and enfranchisement of the negroes. To gain their end they would, like the "Fire-eaters," sacrifice the Constitution and the Union itself. Then there were those of more moderate views, embracing the great bulk of people of all parties who lay between these two extremes. The mass of people in the South deemed slavery the real source of their prosperity, and became ultimately convinced of its soundness in principle. They further believed that its existence was sanctioned by the Constitution throughout the Union wherever people chose to have it. Yet until late in the decade preceding the War of Secession they continued for the most part to subordinate their interpretation of the rights of slavery to the maintenance of the Union. The mass of people in the North deemed slavery wrong, but they believed there was no constitutional sanction for interfering with it in states where it already existed, and they deprecated any action respecting it which might endanger the Union. In addition to these four classes, there were men so constituted that they could decline to take any thought whether slavery were right or wrong, and could deal with every question that arose concerning it as a question of expediency, or of law and precedent.”1

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1 William G. Brown: Stephen Arnold Douglas, p. 65. (Riverside Biographical Series.) An admirable summary.