Lincoln as They Saw Him by Herbert Mitgang- Excerpt

William Cullen Bryant wrote in the New York Evening Post:

When we have such a speech as that of Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, delivered at the Cooper Institute last evening to a crowded, deeply interested and enthusiastic audience, we are tempted to wish that our columns were indefinitely elastic.

We have made room for Mr. Lincoln’s speech notwithstanding the pressure of other matters, and our readers will see that it was well worthy of the deep attention with which it was heard. That part of it in which the speaker places the republican party on the very ground occupied by the framers of our constitution and fathers of our republic, strikes us as particularly forcible.

In this great controversy the Republicans are the real conservative party. They simply adhere to a policy which had its origin with George Washington of Virginia, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, Alexander Hamilton of New York, and other men from other states worthy to be named with them.

It is remarkable how perfectly all the eminent statesmen of that age were agreed upon the great question of slavery in the territories. They never though of erecting the slaveholding class into an oligarchy which was to control the political administration of the country, dictate to the judiciary, and invade and occupy the new regions possessed by the confederation. They regarded it — and this fully appears from authentic and undisputed records —by a consent next to unanimous, as a class which was never to exist beyond the limits of the old thirteen states.

At that time the slave holders were content to await, within the limits they occupied, the hour, which Washington, himself one of their number, benevolent and liberal-minded as he was, hoped was not far distant, when our republic should present to the world the spectacle of ‘a confederacy of free states.’

All the clamor about northern aggression, all the menaces of a dissolution of the Union, have only this grievance as their cause, that we think as Washington thought, hope as he hoped, and act as he acted; and they have only this object in view — to force us from the course he approved and which our conscience approves still, and to compel us to adopt a new policy, new measures, new views of the meaning of the constitution, opening the gates of the territories of the barbarian institution which our fathers intended should wither into decreptitude, and pass to its dissolution within its original limits.

All this may not be new, but it is most logically and convincingly stated in the speech — and it is wonderful how much a truth gains by a certain mastery of clear and impressive statement. But the consequences to which Mr. Lincoln follows out the demands of these arrogant innovators give an air of novelty to the closing part of his argument.

What they require of us is not only a surrender of our long-cherished notions of constitutional rights, inherited from our ancestors and theirs; not only a renunciation of the freedom of speech, but a hypocritical confession of doctrines which revolt both our understanding and our conscience, aconfession extorted by the argument of the highwayman, the threat of violence and murder. There is to be no peace with the South till the slaveholders shall have forced us to say that slavery is right — not merely to admit it by silence, but to shout the accursed doctrine with all the strength of our lungs.

With the renunciation of the creed of liberty must come the reconsideration and rejection of our free constitutions. Every one of the constitutions of the free states puts the stigma of public abhorrence upon slavery, and is an offense and an insult to the slaveholder. They who cannot submit to allow the natural lawfulness of slavery to be questioned in public debate, or in the discussions of the press, certainly will not tolerate the more solemn declaration of the right of all men to freedom embodied and proclaimed in the state constitutions of the North and West. One by one these state constitutions must be given up, torn to pieces, and trampled under foot at the bidding of the preachers of the new political gospel. ✯