A battle opened by so resounding a shot was sure to be furious. Writers and speakers fell upon the fateful paragraph and tore it savagely. They found in it a stimulus which, in fact, was not needed; for already were present all the elements of the fiercest struggle—the best man and the best fighter in each party at the front, and not unevenly matched; a canvass most close and doubtful; and a question which stirred the souls of men with the passions of crusading days. Douglas added experience and distinction to gallantry in attack, adroitness in defense, readiness in personalities, and natural aptitude for popular oratory. Lincoln frankly admitted his formidable qualifications. But the Republican managers had a shrewd appreciation of both opponents; they saw that Lincoln's forte lay in hitting out straight, direct, and hard; and they felt that blows of the kind he delivered should not go out into the air, but should alight upon a concrete object—upon Douglas. They conceived a wise plan. On July 24, 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates. Douglas accepted, and named seven meetings, which he so arranged that he opened and closed four times and Lincoln opened and closed three times; but Lincoln made no point of the inequality; the arrangement was completed, and this famous duel constituted another link in that White House chain.
The setting of the spectacle had the picturesqueness of the times and the region. The people gathered in vast multitudes, to the number of ten thousand, even of twenty thousand, at the places named for the speech-making; they came in their wagons from all the country round, bringing provisions, and making camps in the groves and fields. There were bonfires and music, parading and drinking. He was a singular man in Illinois who was not present at some one of these encounters.
Into a competition so momentous Lincoln entered with a full appreciation of the burden and responsibility which it put upon him. He had at once to meet a false gloss of his famous sentence; and though he had been very precise and accurate in his phraseology for the express purpose of escaping misinterpretation, yet it would have been a marvel in applied political morals if the paraphrases devised by Douglas had been strictly ingenuous. The favorite distortion was to alter what was strictly a forecast into a declaration of a policy, to make a prediction pass for an avowal of a purpose to wage war against slavery until either the "institution" or "Abolitionism" should be utterly defeated and forever exterminated. It was said to be a "doctrine" which was "revolutionary and destructive of this government," and which "invited a warfare between the North and the South, to be carried on with ruthless vengeance, until the one section or the other shall be driven to the wall and become the victim of the rapacity of the other." Such misrepresentation annoyed Lincoln all the more because it was undeserved. The history of the utterance thus maltreated illustrates the deliberate, cautious, thorough way in which his mind worked. So long ago as August 15, 1855, he had closed a letter with the paragraph: "Our political problem now is: Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever, half slave and half free? The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."[78] This is one among many instances which show how studiously Lincoln pondered until he had got his conclusion into that simple shape in which it was immutable. When he had found a form which satisfied him for the expression of a conviction, he was apt to use it repeatedly rather than to seek new and varied shapes, so that substantially identical sentences often recur at distant intervals of time and place.
When one has been long studying with much earnest intensity of thought a perplexing and moving question, and at last frames a conclusion with painstaking precision in perfectly clear language, it is not pleasant to have that accurate utterance misstated with tireless reiteration, and with infinite art and plausibility. But for this vexation Lincoln could find no remedy, and it was in vain that he again and again called attention to the fact that he had expressed neither a "doctrine," nor an "invitation," nor any "purpose" or policy whatsoever. But as it seemed not altogether courageous to leave his position in doubt, he said: "Now, it is singular enough, if you will carefully read that passage over, that I did not say in it that I was in favor of anything. I only said what I expected would take place. … I did not even say that I desired that slavery should be put in course of ultimate extinction. I do say so now, however, so there need be no longer any difficulty about that." He felt that nothing short of such extinction would surely prevent the revival of a dispute which had so often been settled "forever." "We can no more foretell," he said, "where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see the end of the world itself. … There is no way of putting an end to the slavery agitation amongst us but to put it back upon the basis where our fathers placed it. … Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction."
There was much of this eloquence about "the fathers," much evocation of the shades of the great departed, who, having reached the eternal silence, could be claimed by both sides. The contention was none the less strenuous because it was entirely irrelevant; since the opinion of "the fathers" could not make slavery right or wrong. Many times therefore did Douglas charge Lincoln with having said "that the Union could not endure divided as our fathers made it, with free and slave States;" as though this were a sort of blasphemy against the national demigods. Lincoln aptly retorted that, as matter of fact, these same distinguished "fathers"—"Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day"—did not make, but found, the nation half slave and half free; that they set "many clear marks of disapprobation" upon slavery, and left it so situated that the popular mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. Unfortunately it had not been allowed to remain as they had left it; but on the contrary, "all the trouble and convulsion has proceeded from the efforts to spread it over more territory."
Pursuing this line, Lincoln alleged the purpose of the pro-slavery men to make slavery "perpetual and universal" and "national." In his great speech of acceptance at Springfield he put this point so well that he never improved upon this first presentation of it. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 "opened all the national territory to slavery, and was the first point gained. But so far Congress only had acted, and an indorsement by the people, real or imaginary," was obtained by "the notable argument of 'squatter sovereignty,' otherwise called 'sacred right of self-government,' which latter phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: that if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be permitted to object. That argument was incorporated into the Nebraska bill." In May, 1854, this bill was passed. Then the presidential election came. "Mr. Buchanan was elected, and the indorsement was secured. That was the second point gained." Meantime the celebrated case of the negro, Dred Scott, was pending in the Supreme Court, and the "President in his inaugural address fervently exhorted the people to abide by the forthcoming decision, whatever it might be. Then in a few days came the decision," which was at once emphatically indorsed by Douglas, "the reputed author of the Nebraska bill," and by the new President.
"At length a squabble springs up between the President and the author of the