jolly fellowship of men. And he delighted in his children. He would often be seen striding down the main street of Springfield with one boy high on his shoulder, the other following after, hanging to the tail of his long coat. One day both of them were running along beside him crying loudly. "What's the matter with the boys, Mr. Lincoln?" asked a neighbor. "Just what's the matter with the whole world;" Lincoln replied. "I've got three walnuts and each wants two." He now returned to his profession and the work of the courts. Many of his lawyer friends were growing wealthy. But Lincoln still "rode the circuit," a gray shawl about his shoulders, carrying a carpet bag, fat with papers and clothing, and a faded green cotton umbrella without a handle, tied with a piece of twine, "A. Lincoln" in large white muslin letters on the inside. He had great need of money. The "national debt" was paid, but he had his family to support, his father, his devoted step-mother and a ne'er-do-well step-brother to help and, after his father's death, a mortgage on the old home to settle. One night, past one o'clock, after Lincoln had been away for a week, his neighbor heard the sound of an axe. Leaving his bed, he saw Lincoln in the moonlight, chopping wood to cook his supper. "Lincoln," they said, "was his own wood chopper, hostler, stableboy and cow-boy clear down to, and even beyond, the time that he was President-Elect of the United States." And now at last, slavery became the great, pressing question before the people. Thirty years before, in 1820, Missouri had been admitted into the Union, as a state in which slavery would be permitted by law. But it was agreed at that time that slavery should forever be forbidden in all the rest of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase that were north of the southern boundary of Missouri. This "Missouri Compromise" was roughly set aside by a law that had been proposed and introduced in the Senate by Douglas, allowing the two new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, then being organized, to decide for themselves, when they asked for statehood, whether they would be slave states or free states. This plan was called the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and it became a law in 1854. It was hoped that this would solve the dangerous problem, and quiet the passions both of the free North and the slave-holding South; but the North soon realized that what the new law really did was to open to slavery a great territory of the Northwest, a territory that has since given nine states to the Union. So it could no longer be denied that slavery was invading the North. Lincoln had given the warning cry: "Slavery is spreading like wildfire over the country." The famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, had told the nation the story of its horrors. Great poets and orators had been preaching freedom for many years. For the whole North it was a terrible struggle between good and evil, and evil was winning. In the words of Lowell, they saw "Truth forever on the scaffold Wrong forever on the throne." And the hatred of this wrong that had been lulled by compromise, burst out anew and swept the nation on to the Civil War. Slavery became the chief political problem of the country; old party ties and friendships were broken and the Republican party was born to fight the battle of freedom. Abraham Lincoln's hour had come. Douglas was his opponent, an able politician, a powerful speaker. Like Lincoln he had started life poor. He had come from Vermont to Illinois with thirty-seven cents in his pocket, but had soon been admitted to the bar. He had been member of the legislature, Secretary of State, a judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois, three times a Representative at Washington, and was now a Senator at the age of thirty-nine. Returning from Washington Senator Douglas was met in Illinois by a storm of anger, which took all his great courage to face. But he boldly defended his Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Lincoln gave answer with a power he had never before reached in a speech, a power that held a vast crowd breathless for three long hours. It was a speech that made him champion in the great cause. of human liberty. Again within a few days he came to the attack. "Repeal the Missouri Compromise!" cried Lincoln, "Repeal all compromises! Repeal the Declaration of Independence! Repeal past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart that slavery extension is wrong, and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak. . . .Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration that for some men to enslave others is a 'sacred right of self-government.' These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon." These speeches were the opening of the great final conflict between North and South-the great struggle to save the Union and to free the slaves. The fight for the election of a senator in Illinois in 1858 became a personal battle between the two champions, Lincoln |