Douglas had met his first important defeat.  His policy had been repudiated in his own State.  And it was Lincoln who had formulated the argument against him, who had held the balance of power, and had turned the scale.

IX.  THE LITERARY STATESMAN

Lincoln had found at last a mode and an opportunity for concentrating all his powers in a way that could have results.  He had discovered himself as a man of letters.  The great speeches of 1854 were not different in a way from the previous speeches that were without results.  And yet they were wholly different.  Just as Lincoln’s version of an old tale made of that tale a new thing, so Lincoln’s version of an argument made of it a different thing from other men’s versions.  The oratory of 1854 was not state-craft in any ordinary sense.  It was art Lincoln the artist, who had slowly developed a great literary faculty, had chanced after so many rebuffs on good fortune.  His cause stood in urgent need of just what he could give.  It was one of those moments when a new political force, having not as yet any opening for action, finds salvation in the phrase-maker, in the literary artist who can embody it in words.

During the next five years and more, Lincoln was the recognized offset to Douglas.  His fame spread from Illinois in both directions.  He was called to Iowa and to Ohio as the advocate of all advocates who could undo the effect of Douglas.  His fame traveled eastward.  The culmination of the period of literary leadership was his famous speech at Cooper Union in February, 1860.

It was inevitable that he should go along with the antislavery coalition which adopted the name of the Republican party.  But his natural deliberation kept him from being one of its founders.  An attempt of its founders to appropriate him after the triumph at Springfield, in October, 1854, met with a rebuff.(1) Nearly a year and a half went by before he affiliated himself with the new party.  But once having made up his mind, he went forward wholeheartedly.  At the State Convention of Illinois Republicans in 1856 he made a speech that has not been recorded but which is a tradition for moving oratory.  That same year a considerable number of votes were cast for Lincoln for Vice-President in the Republican National Convention.

But all these were mere details.  The great event of the years between 1854 and 1860 was his contest with Douglas.  It was a battle of wits, a great literary duel.  Fortunately for Lincoln, his part was played altogether on his own soil, under conditions in which he was entirely at his ease, where nothing conspired with his enemy to embarrass him.