I began to think of this law of God.  Men are always reaching for it.  Sometimes it is only a club for interest or revenge.  You have offended me.  God will punish you.  If God was opposed to slavery he could have prevented it in the beginning and He could terminate it now.  Perhaps Douglas thought of this when saying that God had not provided a code of municipal law.  If He had, He could have written freedom into the Constitution.  Douglas was at least sure that he knew as much about the law of God as Garrison or Seward, or abolitionist lecturers in back halls.

De Tocqueville had written that “America is the country of the whole world where the question of religion has asserted the most real power over the souls of men.”  The ringing of church bells, church going, revivals, the calling upon God to note and punish sin, pervaded the country and the cities.  The Bible was a textbook of God’s thinking.  It justified slavery in the South; it encouraged abolitionism in the North; it suggested interference and regimentation; it counseled forgiveness and vengeance.

At this time in New York one could not turn or pick up the most casual publication without finding something in the nature of a moral propagandum.  At breakfast I read from the New York Independent that “Rum, profaneness and Sabbath breaking always go together.”  The editor was “sorry to find that the stockholders of the Saratoga railroad still run their cars upon the Sabbath.  It is an odious and monstrous violation, not only of the laws of God, but of all the decencies of Christian society.  And yet I had noticed ladies traveling in them, thundering into Saratoga on the Lord’s Day.  Women traveling in a public conveyance on the Sabbath.  There is something in this peculiarly degrading and shameful.  It ought to be only the lowest of the sex that would stoop to such debasement.”  And another paper said:  “We are sorry to learn that the directors have established an accommodation train for Sunday morning between this city and Poughkeepsie, in addition to the mail train to Albany.  Mr. James Boorman, through whose efficient service as President the road was mainly built, has resigned his office as director and has addressed a firm remonstrance to the Board against this impiety.”

This was the time in which Douglas was now working.  Every one knew what the law of God was.  Every one appealed to the Bible as God’s word.  For much of this Douglas had perfect contempt; and he was quick to sense a taint of it in Seward, or any one whom it had infected.  Such men as Stephens of the South were insisting now that the real intellect-of the North cared nothing about slavery, and only used it to masquerade their centralizing plots.  If local self-government could be extinguished for the purposes of abolition why not for anything, in behalf of which a moral enthusiasm could be evoked?  Why not a constitutional amendment establishing a state religion?  Why not a state religion under the present constitutional clause which makes provision for the general welfare?