September and attempted to make a speech justifying the course of Shields and himself. He was unable to make himself heard, owing to the hoots and jeers of his audience. He thereupon announced that he would speak in the State capitol on October 5. He did so, presenting in varied and more popular form the arguments he had delivered in the Senate. At the close of his address it was announced that a reply would be made to it on the following day by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's opposition in Congress to the Mexican war had been so unpopular with his "jingo" Western constituency that he not only refused to stand for reëlection but resolved to devote himself exclusively to the law, wherein he speedily obtained local preeminence. Probably fearing that he might be impelled to break his resolution and to reënter politics he did not join his townsmen as they crowded into the State capitol to hear the bold and brilliant man who had kindled into its fiercest flame the now lambent, now latent, but ever-living issue of early American politics. However, he was irresistibly drawn to the meeting, and entered the Hall of Representatives in which it was held shortly before the close of Douglas's remarks. He probably had not realized before how deeply he felt on the violation of the national pledge in regard to the restriction of slavery in the Territories, but the sophistry of the advocate of this violation, the very sight of one toward whom he had been on principle an inveterate antagonist and whom he believed with all V his heart to be the prince of demagogues,1 caused him to throw to the winds all selfish personal considerations and, in default of an available statesman of Douglas's rank, to enter the lists himself against the redoubtable "Little Giant" as the champion of national faith and human freedom.

On the day appointed Lincoln spoke for three hours,

1 Lincoln's mantle of "charity for all" was not wide enough to cover the "Little Giant' in the ante-bellum days. Later Lincoln learned that he had misjudged his fellow statesman. This was at the testing of souls in the spring of 1861, when Douglas came to the sorely troubled President and offered his whole-hearted services to the Union cause-an earnest of which he gave soon after in a speech at Chicago, which was the most eloquent of his career as well as his last, since he died a few weeks after delivering it.

President Pierce, supported by jingo Democratic statesmen

From the collection of the New York Historical Society

delivering a terrible philippic against the Nebraska bill. Douglas himself declared that he had heard nothing like it in the Senate. Unfortunately for the archives of American oratory the speech was not reported. However, its argument has been preserved, and undoubtedly in more finished form, in a speech of the same tenor which Lincoln delivered at Peoria two weeks later (October 16) and in the joint debate with Douglas in 1858 [see Vol. V, chapter III].

CHAPTER VIII

"BLEEDING KANSAS"

[DEBATES ON THE ADMISSION OF KANSAS INTO THE UNION]

Foundation of the Republican Party: Its Success in the Elections of 1854President Pierce Sends Special Message to Congress on Kansas in Favor of the Pro-Slavery Party-Answer in the House to the Message by Galusha A. Grow [Pa.]-President Pierce Issues Proclamation Against Interference in Kansas by Men of the Bordering States-House of Representatives Sends Investigating Committee to Kansas-Its ReportDebate on the Report: Anti-Slavery Speakers, Israel Washburn [Me.], Samuel Galloway [O.]; Pro-Slavery Speakers, William H. English [Ind.], Thomas F. Bowie [Md.]-Bill Introduced in the Senate to Admit Kansas into the Union-Debates on the Bill: in Favor of "Popular Sovereignty," Stephen A. Douglas [Ill.]; in Favor of Prohibition of Slavery, William H. Seward [N. Y.]-Bill to Admit Kansas Is Passed in the House, but Rejected in the Senate.

Ο

N May 23, 1854, the day after the passage of the Nebraska bill, some thirty members of the House of Representatives met together to plan their future action on the issue. The leader of the meeting, Israel Washburn, Jr. [Me.], assumed the existence of a new party to which they belonged, and used the name "Republican" to designate it-not as an innovation, however, since it was a term already "in the air," having been suggested at a meeting of "anti-Nebraska" men of all former parties, held in Ripon, Wis., March 20. During the course of the year it was adopted at "antiNebraska" conventions held in various Northern States.

The name, as we have seen, had been the designation of the anti-Federalists, and remained the official name of that party long after it became popularly known as the Democratic party. Indeed, it was still used by a number of Southern members of that party in Congress in preference to the term Democrat.

After the demise of the Federalist party "Republican" was the common element in the name of the two new political factions which arose, the broad constitutional constructionists and the protective tariff men, such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, calling themselves "National Republicans." When the faction assumed the dimensions of a party, it officially adopted the popular designation of Whig.

Accordingly, since the "anti-Nebraska” faction was composed of the larger portion of the Northern Whigs and all of the Free Soil Democrats, there was a unanimous and spontaneous desire of these elements to assume a term which was endeared to them by former political association.

The regular Democrats, on the other hand, vigorously protested against this assumption, which they considered an unwarranted and almost sacrilegious misuse of the revered name. Accordingly, they attempted at first to fix the name "Black Republican" upon the new party. This, though it seemed most odious to themselves, rather strengthened the anti-Nebraskans with the Northern people, who were becoming more and more opposed not only to slavery in the Territories but also in the States, and so the new party was enspirited to accept the designation and to justify it by taking a more advanced position than its founders had originally intended, declaring war against slavery per se. While such a declaration frightened away the more timorous Whigs and Democrats, it secured the adherence of nearly all the Abolitionists, who, though fewer in numbers than the disaffected element, were ardent and successful propagandists, and soon swelled the ranks of the "Black" Republicans with converts that more than made up the balance against them.

In 1854 the new party elected eleven Senators and a plurality of Representatives. It was especially strong in the West, the Eastern men who had become dissatisfied with the old parties preferring to join the Know Nothing party, which, however, was tinged with antislavery sentiment and, being a movement of protest rather than fundamental principle, was ready to break