of his own theory of “non-intervention” and “popular sovereignty,” and built up an elaborate argument to sustain his course.  The novelty of this appeal to the public occasioned general interest and varied comment, and the expedient seemed so ingenious as to excite the envy of Administration Democrats.  Accordingly, Attorney-General Black, of President Buchanan’s Cabinet, at “the request of friends,” wrote, printed, and circulated an anonymous pamphlet in answer, in which he admitted that Douglas was “not the man to be treated with a disdainful silence,” but characterized the “Harper” essay as “an unsuccessful effort at legal precision; like the writing of a judge who is trying in vain to give good reasons for a wrong decision on a question of law which he has not quite mastered.”  Douglas, in a speech at Wooster, Ohio, criticized this performance of Black’s.  Reply and rejoinder on both sides followed in due time; and this war of pamphlets was one of the prominent political incidents of the year.

Thus Lincoln’s advent in the Ohio campaign attracted much more than usual notice.  He made but two speeches, one at Columbus, and one at Cincinnati, at each of which places Douglas had recently preceded him.  Lincoln’s addresses not only brought him large and appreciative audiences, but they obtained an unprecedented circulation in print.  In the main, they reproduced and tersely re-applied the ideas and arguments developed in the Senatorial campaign in Illinois, adding, however, searching comments on the newer positions and points to which Douglas had since advanced.  There is only space to insert a few disconnected quotations: 

Now, what is Judge Douglas’s popular sovereignty?  It is as a principle no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object....

If you will read the copyright essay, you will discover that Judge Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question in 1699, and continued from that time until the Revolution; and, while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with more or less violence ever since the Revolution....

Take these two things and consider them together; present the question of planting a State with the institution of slavery by the side of a question of who shall be Governor of Kansas for a year or two, and is there a man here, is there a man on earth, who would not say the governor question is the little one, and the slavery question is the great one?  I ask any honest Democrat if the small, the local, the trivial and temporary question is not, Who shall be governor? while the durable, the important, and the mischievous one is, Shall this soil be planted with slavery?  This is an idea, I suppose, which has arisen in Judge Douglas’s mind from his peculiar structure.