This Great Struggle by Steven Woodworth Read Free Book Online Page A

legality of slavery throughout the territories. Taney obliged, striking down as unconstitutional all restrictions on slavery, including the venerable Missouri Compromise. No one, Taney announced, had the right to prevent slaveholders from taking their slaves into any of the territories of the United States. Contrary to Buchanan’s hopes, however, the court’s decree did not end all debate of the issue of slavery.
    The unabated virulence of the issue of slavery became immediately obvious when Buchanan tried to secure admittance of Kansas as a slave state on the basis of a constitution drawn up by the blatantly fraudulent proslavery territorial government headquartered in Lecompton. Douglas, though he cared nothing about slavery, denounced this action as a travesty on popular sovereignty and majority rule. A bitter division sprang up within the Democratic Party between the followers of Douglas and those of Buchanan.
    Increasingly it seemed that almost no action in national politics could escape the slavery controversy. The House of Representatives went through a long deadlock unable to elect a speaker as the result of a book written by an obscure North Carolinian. Hinton Rowan Helper was no friend of African Americans, but he was a foe of slavery because he saw how it degraded non-slaveholding southern whites. In his 1857 book The Impending Crisis at the South , Helper attacked the system of slavery and exhorted his fellow non-slaveholding southern whites to vote it out of existence. Slaveholding southerners were furious—and seriously frightened. Nonslaveholders were the majority in the South, and if they ever gave up their commitment to maintaining slavery as the best way of maintaining white supremacy, the institution would be in serious trouble. Slaveholders’ rage multiplied when they learned that the Republican Party, eager to win a hearing among the common folk of the South, had printed and distributed a condensed version of Helper’s book and that a number of Republican politicians had signed a statement endorsing it. Among them was Ohio Republican John Sherman, the party’s candidate for Speaker of the House. Proslavery House members kept that body in turmoil for months and finally succeeded in blocking Sherman’s election. The House chose a compromise candidate instead.
    In 1858, as for the past half dozen years since the deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas was the most prominent political figure in the United States. In political terms, “the Little Giant” towered over even the president of the United States, with whom he was now in the bitterest of political feuds because of his opposition to Buchanan’s cherished Lecompton constitution in Kansas. Douglas was up for reelection to the U.S. Senate that year, and Republican newspapers on the East Coast, notably Horace Greeley’s influential New York Tribune , began to call for the Illinois Republicans to give Douglas their nomination. Prairie State Republicans were appalled and none more so than Abraham Lincoln. A successful Springfield lawyer, Lincoln had come out of political retirement in 1854. No longer simply a Whig Party hack intent on bringing home the bacon for his district, Lincoln, though still ambitious, now had a cause to which to devote his political efforts, and that cause was fighting slavery. In eloquent speeches he made clear that Douglas’s policy of not caring whether the people voted slavery up or voted it down was not good enough for the Republican Party and not good enough for the United States.
    Lincoln won the Illinois Republican nomination for the Senate. His acceptance speech, given in Springfield on June 16, 1858, set the tone for the campaign. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” Lincoln said, quoting the twelfth chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew:
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not