Page:Life of Abraham Lincoln - Bowers - 1922.djvu/22

 20 With reference to his future career a paragraph concerning Texas is here quoted. He says: "Any people, anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to raise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right,—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to a case in which the whole people of an existing government choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." This political philosophy, so comfortably applied to Texas in 1846, is just what the Confederacy wished in 1861; and just exactly what Lincoln did not wish in 1861.

As Lincoln knew all along, his course concerning the war and the administration was displeasing some of his constituents; some of whom would rather be warlike than to be right, others honestly favored expansion. Like most of the other Whigs he had voted for the Ashmun amendment which said that the war had been "unnecessary and unconstitutionally commenced by the President." He learned that some of the people of Springfield would be displeased with an attitude that seemed to weaken the administration in a time of stress, but with Lincoln it was a matter of conscience and he met it fairly without evasion or any sort of coloring. And later when Douglas accused him of being unpatriotic he replied that he had not chosen to skulk, that he had voted for what he thought was the truth, and also reminded his