Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01 by Hay, John, 1835-1905, Nicolay, John George, 1832-1901

There was no reason that Abraham Lincoln should take especial notice of these resolutions, more than another. He had done his work at this session in effecting the removal of the capital. He had only to shrug his shoulders at the violence and untruthfulness of the majority, vote against them, and go back to his admiring constituents, to his dinners and his toasts. But his conscience and his reason forbade him to be silent; he felt a word must be said on the other side to redress the distorted balance. He wrote his protest, saying not one word he was not ready to stand by then and thereafter, wasting not a syllable in rhetoric or feeling, keeping close to law and truth and justice. When he had finished it he showed it to some of his colleagues for their adhesion; but one and all refused, except Dan Stone, who was not a candidate for reelection, having retired from politics to a seat on the bench. The risk was too great for the rest to run. Lincoln was twenty-eight years old; after a youth, of singular privations and struggles he had arrived at an enviable position in the politics and the society of the State. His intimate friends, those whom he loved and honored, were Browning, Butler, Logan, and Stuart--Kentuckians all, and strongly averse to any discussion of the question of slavery. The public opinion of his county, which was then little less than the breath of his life, was all the same way. But all these considerations could not withhold him from performing a simple duty--a duty which no one could have blamed him for leaving undone. The crowning grace of the whole act is in the closing sentence: "The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions is their reason for entering this protest." Reason enough for the Lincolns and Luthers.

He had many years of growth and development before him. There was a long distance to be traversed between the guarded utterances of this protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of emancipation. But the young man who dared declare, in the prosperous beginning of his political life, in the midst of a community imbued with slave-State superstitions, that "he believed the institution of slavery was founded both on injustice and bad policy,"--attacking thus its moral and material supports, while at the same time recognizing all the constitutional guarantees which protected it,--had in him the making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr. His whole career was to run in the lines marked out by these words, written in the hurry of a closing session, and he was to accomplish few acts, in that great history which God reserved for him, wiser and nobler than this.

CHAPTER IX

COLLAPSE OF THE SYSTEM