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

expect the house to fall— but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South. 3
    Lincoln’s contest with Douglas was a David-and-Goliath battle that pitted the five-foot-four-inch Little Giant against the gangly six-foot-four-inch but politically relatively unknown Lincoln. Reluctantly Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates, to be held in venues throughout the state. The debates brought out more clearly than ever the issues that divided the country. Douglas race-baited Lincoln relentlessly, accusing him, in the coarsest of terms, of a belief in racial equality that would have been very unpopular in much of that state. He put Lincoln so badly on the defensive in one down-state venue that the lanky Republican actually did deny a belief in the social equality of the races but came back to assert that an African American had as much right to freedom as any man present, including himself or Douglas. Lincoln took the offensive reminding voters again and again that Douglas’s belief in democracy was not a sufficient moral absolute and that the same moral law that gave any men the right to govern themselves also gave black men and women the right to own themselves.
    Despite a strong performance in the debates, Lincoln lost the election, largely because the state of Illinois had not been redistricted lately, leading to the underrepresentation of Republicans in the legislature. In those days before the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures still elected U.S. senators, thus guarding the sovereignty of the states. Since Republicans were underrepresented in the Illinois legislature, they were unable to elect Lincoln despite the slightly higher number of Republican ballots that Illinois voters had cast. Still, the lanky Springfield Republican had made a name and a national reputation for himself.

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    AND THE WAR CAME
    JOHN BROWN’S HARPERS FERRY RAID AND THE ELECTION OF 1860
    T hroughout the decade of the 1850s, the momentum seemed to shift constantly back and forth between politics and practical action, between the men in frock coats and other men who would not hesitate at all to dirty their hands in any number of ways. John Brown was one such man. He had perpetrated the Pottawatomie killings in Kansas back in 1856. He had also led antislavery militia in battle there against their proslavery opponents. After Kansas had grown quiet, Brown had led armed raids into Missouri, liberating a handful of slaves and appropriating their owners’ horses as well as punishment for the crime of slaveholding and further support for the cause of freedom. Thereafter he had taken his family to live in a racially mixed upstate New York community, an extreme rarity at that time, specifically for the purpose of showing his solidarity with African Americans.
    All the while Brown was planning what he confidently believed would be his greatest stroke against the slave power. He would lead a band of abolitionist fighters into slave territory somewhere in the southern Appalachians. There escaping slaves would flock to join him, and he would organize them into a freed-slave republic that would, he hoped, grow until it overthrew the slave-tolerant U.S. government and replaced the imperfect U.S. Constitution with its own charter, over which Brown had labored many an hour by candlelight in Kansas and New York. When Brown presented the plan to his friend, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the latter was appalled. The plan seemed like suicide and would discredit the abolitionist movement. Nevertheless Brown and his small band of adherents, both white and black, forged ahead.
    In October 1859 he led them