Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/337

Rh even Seward, &quot;Honest Abe&quot; was not always consistent, not always logical; often used political expedients, but was always true to his party and its main ideas. His characteristic traits, as they were in time revealed to the country, won for him something akin to general national affection felt by the Southern as well as Northern people. In his discussion with Mr. Douglas, Mr. Lincoln made slavery the issue, and with terse, striking and popular remarks pressed his antagonist hard. One series of sentences, which he persisted in uttering against the advice of his friends, became the subject of uneasy comment through the South. He said: &quot;I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not 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 absolute 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. Southern men were astounded by these sentences. The possibility of encroaching upon the Free States with the slavery institution had never been under discussion, from the day that the receding of the slavery line southward had begun in Massachusetts. They had contemplated the abolition of slavery by Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and its flow South and West. They had in the early days discussed favorably its gradual extinction and the return of the negroes to Africa. But the wildest fire-eaters had not ventured the suggestion of forcing slavery northward on any States. These sententious statements of Mr. Lincoln sounded in their ears like the blasts of the bugle sounding an advance on all the Southern States, and Mr. Elaine thought in 1884 that this was the meaning which