After twenty-three years of successive defeats, Lincoln, almost fortuitously, was at the center of the political maelstrom.  The clue to what follows is in the way he had developed during that long discouraging apprenticeship to greatness.  Mentally, he had always been in isolation.  Socially, he had lived in a near horizon.  The real tragedy of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the opportunity to know his country as a whole.  Had it been Lincoln instead of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during the ’fifties, it is conceivable that things might have been different in the ’sixties.  On the other hand, America would have lost its greatest example of the artist in politics.

And without that artist, without his extraordinary literary gift, his party might not have consolidated in 1860.  A very curious party it was.  It had sprung to life as a denial, as a device for halting Douglas.  Lincoln’s doctrine of the golden mean, became for once a political power.  Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their need the axiom:  “Stand with anybody so long as he stands right.”  And standing right, for that moment in the minds of them all, meant keeping slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.

The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free white people.  Even the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition of the new party.  So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and Labormen.

However, this coalition, which in origin was purely negative, revealed, the moment it coalesced, two positive features.  To the man of the near horizon in 1860 neither of these features seemed of first importance.  To the man outside that horizon, seeing them in perspective as related to the sum total of American life, they had a significance he did not entirely appreciate.

The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists.  Lincoln ignored it.  He was content with his ringing assertion of the golden mean.  But there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman.  Of temper in politics as an abstract idea, he had been keenly conscious from the first; but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting the joint temper of the whole group.  It was appointed for him to learn this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful audacity.  But in 1860 that stern experience still slept in the future.  He had no suspicion as yet that he might find it difficult to carry out his own promise to stand with the Abolitionists in excluding slavery from the Territories, and to stand against them in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.  He did not yet see why any one should doubt the validity of this promise; why any one should be afraid to go along with him, afraid that the temper of one element would infect the whole coalition.