But as it seemed not altogether courageous to leave his position in doubt, he said:  “Now, it is singular enough, if you will carefully read that passage over, that I did not say in it that I was in favor of anything.  I only said what I expected would take place....  I did not even say that I desired that slavery should be put in course of ultimate extinction.  I do say so now, however, so there need be no longer any difficulty about that.”  He felt that nothing short of such extinction would surely prevent the revival of a dispute which had so often been settled “forever.”  “We can no more foretell,” he said, “where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see the end of the world itself....  There is no way of putting an end to the slavery agitation amongst us but to put it back upon the basis where our fathers placed it....  Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

There was much of this eloquence about “the fathers,” much evocation of the shades of the great departed, who, having reached the eternal silence, could be claimed by both sides.  The contention was none the less strenuous because it was entirely irrelevant; since the opinion of “the fathers” could not make slavery right or wrong.  Many times therefore did Douglas charge Lincoln with having said “that the Union could not endure divided as our fathers made it, with free and slave States;” as though this were a sort of blasphemy against the national demigods.  Lincoln aptly retorted that, as matter of fact, these same distinguished “fathers”—­“Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day”—­did not make, but found, the nation half slave and half free; that they set “many clear marks of disapprobation” upon slavery, and left it so situated that the popular mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.  Unfortunately it had not been allowed to remain as they had left it; but on the contrary, “all the trouble and convulsion has proceeded from the efforts to spread it over more territory.”

Pursuing this line, Lincoln alleged the purpose of the pro-slavery men to make slavery “perpetual and universal” and “national.”  In his great speech of acceptance at Springfield he put this point so well that he never improved upon this first presentation of it.  The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 “opened all the national territory to slavery, and was the first point gained.  But so far Congress only had acted, and an indorsement by the people, real or imaginary,” was obtained by “the notable argument of ‘squatter sovereignty,’ otherwise called ‘sacred right of self-government,’ which latter phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this:  that if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be permitted to object.