He had expected, of course, denunciation by the Abolitionists.  He considered it immaterial.  But he was not in the least prepared for what happened.  A storm burst.  It was fiercest in his own State.  “Traitor,” “Arnold,” “Judas,” were the pleasant epithets fired at him in a bewildering fusillade.  He could not understand it.  Something other than mere Abolitionism had been aroused by his great stroke.  But what was it?  Why did men who were not Abolitionists raise a hue and cry?  Especially, why did many Democrats do so?  Amazed, puzzled, but as always furiously valiant, Douglas hurried home to join battle with his assailants.  He entered on a campaign of speech-making.  On October 3, 1854, he spoke at Springfield.  His enemies, looking about for the strongest popular speaker they could find, chose Lincoln.  The next day he replied to Douglas.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill had not affected any change in Lincoln’s thinking.  His steady, consistent development as a political thinker had gone on chiefly in silence ever since his Protest seventeen years before.  He was still intolerant of Abolitionism, still resolved to leave slavery to die a natural death in the States where it was established.  He defended the measure which most offended the Abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law.  He had appeared as counsel for a man who claimed a runaway slave as his property.(2) None the less, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had brought him to his feet, wheeled him back from law into politics, begun a new chapter.  The springs of action in is case were the factor which Douglas had overlooked, which in all his calculations he had failed to take into account, which was destined to destroy him.

Lincoln, no less than Douglas, had sensed the fact that money was becoming a power in American politics.  He saw that money and slavery tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity in the American social system.  “Humanity” had once been the American shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity.”  And the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich.  The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth.  Because of its place in this new coalition of non-democratic influences, slavery, to Lincoln’s mind, was assuming a new role, “beginning,” as he had said, in the Clay oration, “to assail and ridicule the white man’s charter of freedom, the declaration that ’all men are created free and equal.’”

That phrase, “the white man’s charter of freedom,” had become Lincoln’s shibboleth.  Various utterances and written fragments of the summer of 1854, reveal the intensity of his preoccupation.

“Equality in society beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort"(3)