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combat and that one or the other would dominate the nation’s future was already familiar. Along with Lincoln’s, the most widely publicized statement of this idea also came in 1858, in a speech by William H. Seward in Rochester, New York. The very economic integration promoted by the market revolution, Seward maintained, was bringing the slave and free states—two “radically different” civilizations—into closer contact and placing a greater premium on national unity. “Shall I tell you,” he asked his audience, “what this collision means?…It is an irrepressible conflict between opposed and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”17

Unlike Lincoln, Seward was a self-conscious empire-builder who envisioned a future American nation, having rid itself of slavery, embracing the whole of the North American continent and the Caribbean, as well as “distant islands in either ocean.” He saw the slave South as a relic of a bygone era; aristocratic and economically retrograde, it was out of step with the progressive currents sweeping the nineteenth-century world. Lincoln also saw slavery as an impediment to American destiny, but his sense of the nation’s mission centered less on future imperial power than on demonstrating to the world the superiority of free political institutions. He had little interest in territorial expansion and indeed ridiculed the pretensions of Young America—a group of ebullient nationalists that included Douglas—and their vision of incessant territorial aggrandizement. Unlike Seward, Lincoln’s belief in future national homogeneity rested on political and moral premises, not economic and civilizational ones. But the two concurred that a clash between freedom and slavery was inevitable. As Lincoln wrote in 1860, while he did not accept Seward’s “higher law” doctrine, “I agree with Seward in his ‘Irrepressible Conflict.’”18

In the House Divided speech, Lincoln did not address the rights of black Americans, except when he appeared to suggest that they ought to be covered by the Constitution’s comity clause. But four weeks later, in a speech in Chicago, he tried, once again, to outline his views on this question. Like so many of Lincoln’s other major addresses, this one came in response to a speech by Douglas, delivered in the city the previous day. Douglas had condemned the House Divided speech as a call for civil war by a man who had revealed himself to be a radical abolitionist. Douglas did not mince words in appealing to racism: “This government of ours is founded on the white basis,…for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.” He accused Lincoln of opposing the Dred Scott decision because he favored racial equality. Lincoln’s talk of national uniformity, moreover, revealed a misunderstanding of the essential principle of self-government—“the right of every community to judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong.” Douglas challenged Lincoln’s effort to appropriate the founders to the antislavery cause. Popular sovereignty, he insisted, descended from Jefferson’s vision of a decentralized empire of liberty. Why, he asked, could the nation not continue to exist half-slave and half-free, as it had for over half a century?19

The day after Douglas spoke, Lincoln addressed his rival’s charges head-on, in one of his most eloquent speeches. First, he responded to Douglas’s argument about national diversity. The future of slavery, a “vast moral evil,” could not be equated with “the cranberry laws of Indiana, the oyster laws of Virginia, or the Liquor Laws of Maine.” On such issues, each locality could and should determine policy for itself. But slavery was a national question—later in the campaign he would call it a “wrong” to “the whole nation”—that demanded a national solution.

Chicago was a center of Radical Republicanism. Lincoln knew his audience would not object when he declared, “I have always hated slavery I think as much as any Abolitionist.” But