All the Powers of Earth by Sidney Blumenthal

Author:Sidney Blumenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Quincy was a town on the Mississippi that had originally been Douglas’s home, had tilted Democratic against Whigs, gone for Buchanan in 1856, but had a sizable German population, in short, the sort of swing district Lincoln needed. On October 13, he opened by replying again to well-worn accusations. Talking about misrepresentations of what Lincoln said where and the different platforms of the Republican Party was becoming tired theater. Then he got to slavery itself. He called slavery “wrong” thirty-three times. “I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong—we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong. We think it as a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that extends itself to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.”

Douglas would not engage Lincoln on the moral wrong of slavery. He immediately accused him of slander. “I regret that Mr. Lincoln should have deemed it proper for him to again indulge in gross personalities and base insinuations in regard to the Springfield resolutions.” He went through his old arguments in elaborate detail, again accused Lincoln of hypocrisy and quoted the Chicago speech. “Did old Giddings, when he came down among you four years ago, preach more radical abolitionism than that? (‘No, never.’) Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred Douglass, ever take higher Abolition grounds than that? . . . He knew that I alluded to his negro-equality doctrines when I spoke of the enormity of his principles, yet he did not find it convenient to answer on that point.” Then he cited the “house divided” speech, ridiculing Lincoln. “How then does Lincoln propose to save the Union, unless by compelling all the States to become free, so that the house shall not be divided against itself? He intends making them all free; he will preserve the Union in that way, and yet, he is not going to interfere with slavery anywhere it now exists. How is he going to bring it about? Why, he will agitate, he will induce the North to agitate until the South shall be worried out, and forced to abolish slavery. . . . and it does not become Mr. Lincoln, or anybody else, to tell the people of Kentucky that they have no consciences, that they are living in a state of iniquity, and that they are cherishing an institution to their bosoms in violation of the law of God.

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