The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.-The following year the interest of the whole country was drawn to a series of debates held in Illinois by Lincoln and Douglas,both candidates for the United States Senate.In the course of his cam-paign Lincoln had uttered his trenchant saying that "a house divided against itself cannot stand.I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."At the same time he had accused Douglas,Buchanan,and the Supreme Court of acting in concert to make slavery national.This daring statement arrested the attention of Douglas,who was ****** his campaign on the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty;"that is,the right of the people of each territory "to vote slavery up or down."After a few long-distance shots at each other,the candidates agreed to meet face to face and discuss the issues of the day.Never had such crowds been seen at political meetings in Illinois.Farmers deserted their plows,smiths their forges,and housewives their baking to hear "Honest Abe"and "the Little Giant."
The results of the series of debates were momentous.Lincoln clearly defined his position.The South,he admitted,was entitled under the Constitution to a fair,fugitive slave law.He hoped that there might be no new slave states;but he did not see how Congress could exclude the people of a territory from admissionas a state if they saw fit to adopt a constitution legalizing the ownership of slaves.He favored the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the total exclusion of it from the territories of the United States by act of Congress.
Moreover,he drove Douglas into a hole by asking how he squared "squatter sovereignty"with the Dred Scott decision;how,in other words,the people of a territory could abolish slavery when the Court had declared that Congress,the superior power,could not do it under the Constitution?To this baffling question Douglas lamely replied that the inhabitants of a territory,by "unfriendly legislation,"might make property in slaves insecure and thus destroy the institution.This answer to Lincoln's query alienated many Southern Democrats who believed that the Dred Scott decision settled the question of slavery in the territories for all time.Douglas won the election to the Senate;but Lincoln,lifted into national fame by the debates,beat him in the campaign for President two years later.
John Brown's Raid.-To the abolitionists the line of argument pursued by Lincoln,including his proposal to leave slavery untouched in the states where it existed,was wholly unsatisfactory.One of them,a grim and resolute man,inflamed by a hatred for slavery in itself,turned from agitation to violence."These men are all talk;what is needed is action-action!"So spoke John Brown of New York.During the sanguinary struggle in Kansas he hurried to the frontier,gun and dagger in hand,to help drive slave owners from the free soil of the West.There he committed deeds of such daring and cruelty that he was outlawed and a price put upon his head.Still he kept on the path of "action."Aided by funds from Northern friends,he gathered a small band of his followers around him,saying to them:"If God be for us,who can be against us?"He went into Virginia in the autumn of 1859,hoping,as he explained,"to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Samson."He seized the gov-ernment armory at Harper's Ferry,declared free the slaves whom he found,and called upon them to take up arms in defense of their liberty.His was a hope as forlorn as it was desperate.Armed forces came down upon him and,after a hard battle,captured him.Tried for treason,Brown was condemned to death.The gov-ernor of Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground that the prisoner was simply a lunatic."This is a beautiful country,"said the stern old Brown glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way to the gallows,as calmly as if he were returning home from a long journey."So perish all such enemies of Vir-ginia.All such enemies of the Union.All such foes of the human race,"solemnly announced the executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law.
The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country.Abolitionists looked upon Brown as a martyr and tolled funeral bells on the day of his execution.
Longfellow wrote in his diary:"This will be a great day in our history;the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old one."Jefferson Davis saw in the affair "the invasion of a state by a murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder helpless women and children"-a crime for which the leader had met a felon's death.Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd,the deed of an enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them-an attempt which ended in "little else than his own execution."To Republican leaders as a whole,the event was very embarrassing.They were taunted by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed.Douglas declared his "firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the natural,logical,inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican party."So persistent were such attacks that the Republicans felt called upon in 1860to denounce Brown's raid "as among the gravest of crimes."
