What his qualities showed him were two things:  the alliance of the plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people.  Hence his conclusion which became his party’s conclusion:  that, in the South, a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This was not the truth.  Lincoln’s defects in 1860 limited his vision.  Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error.  The palpable evidence all confirmed it.  What might have contradicted it was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit.  Just what a nature like Lincoln’s, if only he could have met them, would have perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas’s, no matter how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor comprehend.  It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing Lincoln it was denied.  In a word, the Southern reaction against the Republicans, like the Republican movement itself, had both a positive and a negative side.  It was the positive side that could be seen and judged at long range.  And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.

The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see.  He was too far away to make out the details of the picture.  Though he may have known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere handful—­just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere handfuls.  But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and distrust the North.  They, like him, were suffering from a near horizon.  They, too, were applying the principle “Stand with anybody so long as he stands right” But for them, standing right meant preventing a violent revolution in Southern life.  Indifferent as they were to slavery, they were willing to go along with the “slave-barons” in the attempt to consolidate the South in a movement of denial—­a denial of the right of the North, either through Abolitionism or through tariff, to dominate the South.

If only Lincoln with his subtle mind could have come into touch with the negative side of the Southern agitation!  It was the other side, the positive side, that was vocal.  With immense shrewdness the profiteers of slavery saw and developed their opportunity.  They organized the South.  They preached on all occasions, in all connections, the need of all Southerners to stand together, no matter how great their disagreements, in order to prevent the impoverishment of the South by hostile economic legislation.  During the late ’fifties their propaganda for an all-Southern policy, made slow but constant headway.  But even in 1859 these ideas were still far from controlling the South.