Douglas saw the trap.  With his instantaneous facility he tried to cloud the issue and extricate himself through evasion in the very manner Mrs. Stowe has described.  While dodging a denial of the court’s authority, he insisted that his doctrine of local autonomy was still secure because through police regulation the local legislature could foster or strangle slavery, just as they pleased, no matter “what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution.”

As Lincoln’s friends had foreseen, this matchless performance of carrying water on both shoulders caught the popular fancy; Douglas was reelected to the Senate.  As Lincoln had foreseen, it killed him as a Democratic leader; it prevented the reunion of the Democratic party.  The result appeared in 1860 when the Republicans, though still a minority party, carried the day because of the bitter divisions among the Democrats.  That was what Lincoln foresaw when he said to his fearful friends while they argued in vain to prevent his asking the question at Free-port.  “I am killing larger game; the great battle of 1860 is worth a thousand of this senatorial race."(6)

X. THE DARK HORSE

One of the most curious things in Lincoln is the way his confidence in himself came and went.  He had none of Douglas’s unwavering self-reliance.  Before the end, to be sure, he attained a type of self-reliance, higher and more imperturbable.  But this was not the fruit of a steadfast unfolding.  Rather, he was like a tree with its alternating periods of growth and pause, now richly in leaf, now dormant.  Equally applicable is the other familiar image of the successive waves.

The clue seems to have been, in part at least, a matter of vitality.  Just as Douglas emanated vitality—­so much so that his aura filled the whole Senate chamber and forced an unwilling response in the gifted but hostile woman who watched him from the gallery—­Lincoln, conversely, made no such overpowering impression.  His observers, however much they have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never forget their impression that at heart he is sad.  His fondness for poetry in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud.”

It is impossible to discover any law governing the succession of his lapses in self-reliance.  But they may be related very plausibly to his sense of failure or at least to his sense of futility.  He was one of those intensely sensitive natures to whom the futilities of this world are its most discouraging feature.  Whenever such ideas were brought home to him his energy flagged; his vitality, never high, sank.  He was prone to turn away from the outward life to lose himself in the inner.  All this is part of the phenomena which Herndon perceived more clearly than he comprehended it, which led him to call Lincoln a fatalist.