These events called forth Mr. Lincoln once more to do battle for the right. He entered into the canvass of 1854, as one of the most active leaders of the "Anti-Nebraska" movement. He addressed the people repeatedly from the stump, with all his characteristic earnestness and energy. He met and cowed the author of the "Nebraska iniquity," in the presence of the masses, and powerfully aided in effecting the remarkable political changes of that year in Illinois.

The incendiary act had come to the final vote, in the Senate, on the 26th day of May. About the first of August, Congress adjourned. Douglas lingered by the way on his return to his constituents, and reached Chicago near the close of that month. Here he met a storm of indignation from the people whom, for manifesting their disapprobation of his conduct, he compla cently termed a "mob." He had proposed to speak in self vindication, on the evening of the first day of September. He was received with the most decisive demonstrations of popular indignation, which he attempted to face down with an uncompromising insolence of manner, that only tended to increase the excitement against him. After long perseverance in an attempt to compel a hearing, he was forced to succumb. All over the State he early discovered the same state of feeling existing among a large portion of his constituents, although there was no refusal to hear him, except in this first unlucky effort to defy and silence a crowd by bullying deportment. The popular rage gradually subsided, but the deliberate sentiment of the people of Illinois on this subject was rather confirmed and strengthened in succeeding years. From commanding a large majority of the popular vote, as he had done previously, his strength dwindled away, until from that time on, he and the party that sustained him, were in a positive minority in the State. The reader can judge how much this, to him, painful truth, had to do with the change of policy adopted by him, in opposing the Lecompton Constitution, the legitimate fruit of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and substantially approved by him in advance, in a speech made in Springfield, in 1857.

Mr. Douglas visited several parts of the State, vainly attempt.

ing, by ingenious but sophistical addresses to the people to avert the impending revolution. Mr. Lincoln met him in debate at Springfield, during the time of the State Fair, early in October, 1854, and the encounter was a memorable one in the great campaign then in progress. They met a few days later at Peoria, where Mr. Douglas had no better fortune. Subsequently to that encounter, he showed a decided preference for speaking at other times and places than Mr. Lincoln did.

The Anti-Nebraska organization, formed at Springfield in October of that year, and embracing men of all parties opposed to the ill-judged measures which had introduced the most violent agitation in regard to slavery ever known in the country, was the beginning from which the Republican party in Illinois was to be matured. Among the resolutions at that time adopted, after setting forth in a preamble that a majority of Congress had deliberately and wantonly re-opened the controversy respecting the extension of slavery under our national jurisdiction, which a majority of the people had understood to be closed forever by the successive compromises of 1820 and 1850, were the following:

Resolved, That the doctrine affirmed by the Nebraska Bill, and gilded over by its advocates, with the specious phrases of non-intervention and popular sovereignty, is really and clearly a complete surrender of all the ground hitherto asserted and maintained by the Federal Government, with respect to the limitation of slavery, is a plain confession of the right of the slaveholder to transfer his human chattels to any part of the public domain, and there hold them as slaves as long as inclination or interest may dictate; and that this is an attempt totally to reverse the doctrine hitherto uniformly held by statesmen and jurists, that slavery is the creature of local and State law, and to make it a national institution.

Resolved, That as freedom is national, and slavery sectional and local, the absence of all law upon the subject of slavery presumes the existence of a state of freedom alone, while slavery exists only by virtue of positive law.

Resolved, That we heartily approve the course of the freemen of Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, New York, Michigan and Maine, postponing or disregarding their minor differences of opinion or preferences, and acting together cordially and trustingly in the same cause of freedom,

of free labor, and free soil, and we commend their spirit to the freemen of this and other States, exhorting each to renounce his party whenever and wherever that party proves unfaithful to human freedom.

In behalf of these principles, Mr. Lincoln had already taken the stump, and for them he did valiant service in various parts of the State.

This new party was organized late in the season, and the canvass for Treasurer, the only State officer to be elected, was but imperfectly made. In some parts of the State, there was even no distribution of tickets containing the name of this candidate. The result, even under these unfavorable circumstances, and in spite of the overwhelming Democratic preponderance during the previous twenty-five years, was extremely close, and for a long time doubtful. The Democratic candidate barely escaped defeat. This was the last election in which the party sustaining Douglas has had even the appearance of a majority in Illinois. The revolution was now substantially accomplished. From that day to the present, the Republican party has been steadily gaining in strength, and that opposed to it sinking more and more into a hopeless minority. Even the temporary reaction, under the Anti-Lecompton flag, was more apparent than real.

Of the nine Congressional Districts, the Opposition now, for the first time, carried a majority, electing five members, and the Democrats four. The Legislature would have been completely revolutionized, in both branches, with little doubt, but for the large number of Democrats "holding over," as members of the new Senate. In the House, the Anti-Nebraska representatives numbered forty, and the Democratic thirtyfive. In the Senate, there were seventeen elected as Democrats, and eight as Opposition men. Of the former, however, there were three, elected two years previously, who repudiated Douglas and his policy, and inclined to the Opposition. These were Norman B. Judd, J. M. Palmer, and B. C. Cook. Reckoning these with the Anti-Nebraska side, the Senate stood, Opposition eleven, Democrats fourteen-leaving a

majority against the Douglas Democracy of two on joint 'ballot.

A United States Senator, to succeed Gen. Shields on the 4th of March, 1855, was to be chosen by this Legislature. For the first time in the history of Illinois, the election of an Anti-Democratic Senator was within the reach of possibility. Mr. Lincoln was the first choice of the great mass of the Opposition for this position. From his prominence, for a long time, in the old Whig party, it was but natural that a portion of the members having Democratic antecedents who had come into the new organization, should hesitate to give Mr. Lincoln their votes. This was especially true of the three Senators above named as holding over, they having been elected as regular Democrats. Under this state of things, it was manifest, after a few ballots, that, with the close vote in joint convention the election of a Democrat, not to be certainly relied on as an opponent of the Douglas policy, and at best uncommitted in regard to the new party organization, might be the result of adhering to Mr. Lincoln. He, accordingly, with the self-sacrificing disposition which had always characterized him, promptly appealed to his Whig friends to go over in a solid body to Mr. Trumbull, a man of Democratic antecedents, who could command the full vote of the Anti-Nebraska Democrats. By these earnest and disinterested efforts, the difficult task was accomplished, great as was the sacrifice of personal feeling which it cost the devoted friends of Mr. Lincoln. On the part of himself and them, it involved the exercise of a degree of self-denial and magnanimity, as rare as it was noble. It demonstrated their honest attachment to the great cause for which old party lines had been abandoned, and their sincere purpose of thoroughly ignoring all differences founded on mere partisan prejudice.. It cemented the union of these Anti-Nebraka elements, and consolidated the new organization into a permanent party.

The joint convention for electing a United States Senator met on the 8th day of February, 1855. On the first ballot, James Shields, then Senator, who had been iuduced by Douglas, against his own better judgment, to vote for the

Kansas-Nebraska bill, received 41 votes, and three other Democrats had one vote each. Abraham Lincoln had 45 votes, Lyman Trumbull 5, Mr. Koerner 2, and there were three other scattering votes. On the seventh ballot, the Democratic vote was concentrated upon Gov. Matteson, with two exceptions, and he received also the votes of two AntiNebraska Democrats, making 44 in all. On the tenth ballot, Mr. Trumbull was elected, in the way just explained, receiving 51 votes, and Mr. Matteson 47. Every Whig vote but one was given to Mr. Trumbull.

Among the speeches delivered by Mr. Lincoln in this memorable campaign, which gave the Republicans an able Senator from Illinois, and which effectually accomplished the overthrow of the Democracy in that State, perhaps the ablest and most characteristic was the one delivered at Peoria, important portions of which were quoted by him in the canvass with Douglas, four years later. The following detached passages of this speech are specially memorable:

This declared indifference, but as I must think real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself; I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest..

When the Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.

When the white man governs himself, that is, self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why, then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no moral