principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.  They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people.  They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.  We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.  This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.  Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

Douglas’s quarrel with the Buchanan administration had led many Republicans to hope that they might be able to utilize his name and his theory of popular sovereignty to aid them in their local campaigns.  Lincoln knew from his recent experience the peril of this delusive party strategy, and was constant and earnest in his warnings against adopting it.  In a little speech after the Chicago municipal election on March 1, 1859, he said: 

“If we, the Republicans of this State, had made Judge Douglas our candidate for the Senate of the United States last year, and had elected him, there would to-day be no Republican party in this Union....  Let the Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas, let them fall in behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him—­he absorbs them.  They would come out at the end all Douglas men, all claimed by him as having indorsed every one of his doctrines upon the great subject with which the whole nation is engaged at this hour—­that the question of negro slavery is simply a question of dollars and cents? that the Almighty has drawn a line across the continent, on one side of which labor—­the cultivation of the soil—­must always be performed by slaves.  It would be claimed that we, like him, do not care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.  Had we made him our candidate and given him a great majority, we should never have heard an end of declarations by him that we had indorsed all these dogmas.”

To a Kansas friend he wrote on May 14, 1859: 

“You will probably adopt resolutions in the nature of a platform.  I think the only temptation will be to lower the Republican standard in order to gather recruits In my judgment, such a step would be a serious mistake, and open a gap through which more would pass out than pass in.  And this would be the same whether the letting down should be in deference to Douglasism, or to the Southern opposition element; either would surrender the object of the Republican organization—­the preventing of the spread and nationalization of slavery....  Let a union be attempted on the basis of ignoring the slavery question, and magnifying other questions which the people are just now not caring about, and it will result in gaining no single electoral vote in the South, and losing every one in the North.”

To Schuyler Colfax (afterward Vice-President) he said in a letter dated July 6, 1859: