the precise relationship and fundamental significance of all that was then in process of saying and doing.  Time must elapse, and distance must enable one to get a comprehensive view, before the philosophy of an era like that of the civil war becomes intelligible.  But the philosophy is not the less correct because those who were framing it piece by piece did not at any one moment project before their mental vision the whole in its finished proportions and relationship.

FOOTNOTES: 

[75] As an example of Greeley’s position, see letter quoted by N. and H. ii. 140, note.  The fact that he was strenuously pro-Douglas and anti-Lincoln is well known.  Yet afterward he said that it “was hardly in human nature” for Republicans to treat Douglas as a friend.  Greeley’s American Conflict, i. 301.

[76] Wilson, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, ii. 567; for sketches of Douglas’s position, see Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, i. 141-144; von Holst, Const.  Hist. of U.S. vi. 280-286; Herndon, 391-395; N. and H. ii. 138-143; Lamon, 390-395; Holland, 158.  Crittenden was one of the old Whigs, who now sorely disappointed Lincoln by preferring Douglas.  N. and H. ii. 142.

[77] Several months afterward, October 25, 1858, Mr. Seward made the speech at Rochester which contained the famous sentence:  “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.”  Seward’s Works, new edition, 1884, iv. 292.  But Seward ranked among the extremists and the agitators.  See Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 244.  After all, the idea had already found expression in the Richmond Enquirer, May 6, 1856, quoted by von Hoist, vi. 299, also referred to by Lincoln; see Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 262.

[78] Letter to Hon. Geo. Robertson, N. and H. i. 392; and see Lamon, 398; also see remarks of von Holst, vi. 277.

[79] Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 93.  W.P.  Fessenden, “who,” says Mr. Blaine, “always spoke with precision and never with passion,” expressed his opinion that if Fremont had been elected instead of Buchanan, that decision would never have been given. Twenty Years of Congress, i. 133.

[80] Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger B. Taney, James Buchanan.

[81] Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 198.  At Chicago he said that he would vote for the prohibition of slavery in a new Territory “in spite of the Dred Scott decision.” Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 20; and see the rest of his speech on the same page.  The Illinois Republican Convention, June 16. 1858, expressed “condemnation of the principles and tendencies of the extra-judicial opinions of a majority of the judges,” as putting forth a “political heresy.”  Holland, 159.