“My main object in such conversation would be to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally and particularly for the contest of 1860.  The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to ‘platform’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere and especially in a national convention.  As instances:  the movement against foreigners in Massachusetts; in New Hampshire, to make obedience to the fugitive-slave law punishable as a crime; in Ohio, to repeal the fugitive-slave law; and squatter sovereignty, in Kansas.  In these things there is explosive matter enough to blow up half a dozen national conventions, if it gets into them; and what gets very rife outside of conventions is very likely to find its way into them.”

And again, to another warm friend in Columbus, Ohio, he wrote in a letter dated July 28, 1859: 

“There is another thing our friends are doing which gives me some uneasiness.  It is their leaning toward ‘popular sovereignty.’  There are three substantial objections to this.  First, no party can command respect which sustains this year what it opposed last.  Secondly Douglas (who is the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious one) would have little support in the North, and, by consequence, no capital to trade on in the South, if it were not for his friends thus magnifying him and his humbug.  But lastly, and chiefly, Douglas’s popular sovereignty, accepted by the public mind as a just principle, nationalizes slavery, and revives the African slave-trade inevitably.  Taking slaves into new Territories, and buying slaves in Africa, are identical things, identical rights or identical wrongs, and the argument which establishes one will establish the other.  Try a thousand years for a sound reason why Congress shall not hinder the people of Kansas from having slaves, and when you have found it, it will be an equally good one why Congress should not hinder the people of Georgia from importing slaves from Africa.”

An important election occurred in the State of Ohio in the autumn of 1859, and during the canvass Douglas made two speeches in which, as usual, his pointed attacks were directed against Lincoln by name.  Quite naturally, the Ohio Republicans called Lincoln to answer him, and the marked impression created by Lincoln’s replies showed itself not alone in their unprecedented circulation in print in newspapers and pamphlets, but also in the decided success which the Ohio Republicans gained at the polls.  About the same time, also, Douglas printed a long political essay in “Harper’s Magazine,” using as a text quotations from Lincoln’s “House divided against itself” speech, and Seward’s Rochester speech defining the “irrepressible conflict.”  Attorney-General Black of President Buchanan’s cabinet here entered the lists with an anonymously printed pamphlet in pungent criticism of Douglas’s “Harper” essay; which again was followed by reply and rejoinder on both sides.