Excerpt from Lest We Forget

This was foreshadowed by Mr Lincoln in his memorable speech at Springfield in September, 1858. He said: If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the-operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself can not stand. I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dis solved - 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 ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

President Buchanan was completely under the influence of the slave power. The admission of Kansas was a burning issue and Buchanan did all in his power to foist a fraudulent Constitution adopted by a rump convention of slaveholders from Missouri upon the people of that territory.

Mr. Douglas refused to be a party to the scheme and denounced it severely in the Senate chamber. Buchanan was furious at the stand taken by Douglas and said to him: Mr. Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed. Douglas replied in an emphatic manner: Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.

It is almost impossible at this time, nearly half a century after the emanei patiou proclamation, when slavery is universally admitted to be a monstrous wrong, degrading both to master and slaves, to realize that all over the North the word Abolitionist was a term of vile reproach. That the public expression of anti slavery sentiments was met with howlings, revilings and rotten eggs. In 1832, Elijah P. Lovejoy, a young Congregational minister, came to St. Louis from Maine and established an Orthodox Protestant newspaper. He published something to the effect that intemperance and slavery were not conducive to godliness. As a consequence his establishment was destroyed and he was driven from the city. He located at Alton and made public the same sentiments. He was told to move on. And failing to do so his presses were a second time destroyed by a mob. He resolved to renew his establishment, and with a few friends stood to arms to defend his right of free speech and his property, when he was shot dead by pro slavery ruffians. No merited justice was ever meted out to his murderers, nor restitution for his property to his family. Posterity erected a monument to his memory. It is a conservative estimate when I say that scarcely more than one person out of a thousand in the North was an aggressive abolitionist, one who favored the abolition of slavery at all hazards. There was no disposition to meddle with the system in the slave States. They had conceded to the South a representa tion in the House of Representatives based on three-fifths of their slaves, but the time had come when they proposed that no more slave States should be made from the territories.

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