We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure.  We must pull down our free-state Constitutions....  If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away.  If it is right, we cannot object to its nationality, its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its enlargement.  All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.  Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.  Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?...  Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States?  If our sense of duty forbids this ... let us be diverted by no sophistical contrivances, such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule and calling not the sinners but the righteous to repentance.”

The next morning the best newspapers gave full reports of the speech, with compliments.  The columns of the “Evening Post” were generously declared to be “indefinitely elastic” for such utterances; and the “Tribune” expressed commendation wholly out of accord with the recent notions of its editor.  The rough fellow from the crude West had made a powerful impression upon the cultivated gentlemen of the East.

From New York Lincoln went to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.  In this last-named State he delivered speeches which are said to have contributed largely to the Republican success in the closely contested election then at hand.  In Manchester it was noticed that “he did not abuse the South, the administration, or the Democrats, or indulge in any personalities, with the exception of a few hits at Douglas’s notions."[94]

These speeches of 1858, 1859, and 1860 have a very great value as contributions to history.  During that period every dweller in the United States was hotly concerned about this absorbing question of slavery, advancing his own views, weighing or encountering the arguments of others, quarreling, perhaps, with his oldest friends and his nearest kindred,—­for about this matter men easily quarreled and rarely compromised.  Every man who fancied that he could speak in public got upon some platform in city, town,