Abraham Lincoln
had long regarded slavery as an evil. In a speech in Peoria, Illinois,
in 1854, he declared that all national legislation should be framed
on the principle that slavery was to be restricted and eventually abolished.
He contended also that the principle of popular sovereignty was false,
for slavery in the western territories was the concern not only of the
local inhabitants but of the United States as a whole. This speech made
him widely known throughout the growing West.
In 1858 Lincoln
opposed Stephen A. Douglas for election to the U.S. Senate from Illinois.
In the first paragraph of his opening campaign speech, on June 17, Lincoln
struck the keynote of American history for the seven years to follow:
A house divided
against itself cannot stand. 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.
Lincoln and Douglas
engaged in a series of seven debates in the ensuing months of 1858.
Senator Douglas, known as the "Little Giant," had an enviable reputation
as an orator, but he met his match in Lincoln, who eloquently challenged
the concept of popular sovereignty as defined by Douglas and his allies.
In the end, Douglas won the election by a small margin, but Lincoln
had achieved stature as a national figure.
Sectional strife
was growing ever more acute. On the night of October 16, 1859, John
Brown, an antislavery fanatic who had captured and killed five proslavery
settlers in Kansas three years before, led a band of followers in an
attack on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in what is now the state
of West Virginia. Brown's goal was to use the weapons seized to lead
a slave uprising. After two days of fighting, Brown and his surviving
men were taken prisoner by a force of U.S. marines commanded by Colonel
Robert E. Lee.
Alarm ran through
the nation. For many Southerners, Brown's attempt confirmed their worst
fears. Antislavery zealots, on the other hand, hailed Brown as a martyr
to a great cause. Most Northerners repudiated his deed, seeing in it
an assault on law and order. Brown was tried for conspiracy, treason
and murder, and on December 2, 1859, he was hanged. To the end, he believed
he had been an instrument in the hand of God.