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By Root 1767 0

or should be formed. Now, he concluded, “that question [slavery] is a paramount one.” In language that achieved an eloquence and moral power not presaged in his previous speeches, Lincoln condemned slavery as a violation of the nation’s founding principles as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence: human equality and mankind’s natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He spoke openly of achieving slavery’s “ultimate extinction,” although he acknowledged that he had little idea how this could be accomplished. During the 1850s, Illinois, a state divided between a southern section closely tied to the Border South and a rapidly growing northern region populated from the Northeast, became, in the words of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, “the battleground for the Slave Power and for the Republicans.”4 And no one played a more important part in the battle for Illinois, and therefore the nation, than Abraham Lincoln.

I

LINCOLN did not immediately raise his voice in opposition to Douglas’s bill. While “anti-Nebraska” meetings sprang up throughout the North in the first few months of 1854, he remained silent. But Lincoln was hardly inactive. He contributed unsigned editorials condemning Douglas’s measure to the Illinois State Journal, Springfield’s Whig newspaper. According to a Democratic journalist writing in the early fall, Lincoln had been “nosing around for weeks in the state library.” There, he consulted the founders’ statements about slavery, previous congressional debates, Douglas’s own speeches, and even census returns. He began speaking publicly in mid-August. Fragmentary newspaper accounts report that he urged opponents of slavery’s expansion to unite to achieve repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, while insisting on respect for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of slaveowners. He probably delivered much the same speech at a number of venues. But not until he presented it at Peoria did a full copy, provided by Lincoln himself, appear in the press. At 17,000 words it was the longest speech he ever delivered. To publish it in its entirety, the State Journal devoted a considerable part of seven consecutive issues to the speech.5

Lincoln had finally found a subject worthy of his intellectual talent and political ambition. The Peoria speech entirely ignored the economic issues that had dominated his career until 1854. It said nothing about other questions roiling the political landscape, such as temperance, immigration, and anti-Catholicism. Instead, Lincoln offered a prolonged examination of the history of the slavery question and a series of reflections on how to think about slavery’s place in American life. His basic argument was straightforward: Douglas’s bill represented a profound departure from the original intention of the founding fathers, who sought to restrict the spread of slavery and hoped to see it eventually die out. In the Declaration of Independence, they had established a set of maxims about equality and liberty that defined the essence of the American experiment and that slavery violated fundamentally. The Constitution contained unavoidable compromises that protected slavery, and thus the North must respect the rights of slaveholders where the institution already existed. But no such obligation applied to the territories. Lincoln emphasized his determination to maintain an iron-clad “distinction” between “the existing institution, and the extension of it.” Yet at several points in the speech he moved seamlessly from the right and wrong of the expansion of slavery to the right and wrong of slavery itself. His language and the logic of his argument unavoidably called into question the future of slavery in the United States.

Douglas’s willingness to see slavery spread, Lincoln declared, violated the core principles of American nationality and fatally compromised the country’s world-historical mission:

This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery