He thought upon this subject in the same manner in which he thought as a lawyer, sweeping aside everything but what seemed to him the ethical reality at the heart of the case.  For him the “right” of a State to do this or that was a constitutional question only so long as it did not cross that other more universal “right,” the paramount “charter of liberty,” by which, in his view, all other rights were conditioned.  He would impose on all mankind, as their basic moral obligation, the duty to sacrifice all personal likes, personal ambitions, when these in their permanent tendencies ran contrary to the tendency which he rated as paramount.  Such had always been, and was always to continue, his own attitude toward slavery.  No one ever loathed it more.  But he never permitted it to take the first place in his thoughts.  If it could be eradicated without in the process creating dangers for popular government he would rejoice.  But all the schemes of the Abolitionists, hitherto, he had condemned as dangerous devices because they would strain too severely the fabric of the popular state, would violate agreements which alone made it possible.  Therefore, being always relentless toward himself, he required of himself the renunciation of this personal hope whenever, in whatever way, it threatened to make less effective the great democratic state which appeared to him the central fact of the world.

The enlargement of his reasoning led him inevitably to an unsparing condemnation of the Virginian theory.  One of his rare flashes of irritation was an exclamation that Virginia loyalty always had an “if."(6) At this point, to make him entirely plain, there is needed another basic assumption which he has never quite formulated.  However, it is so obviously latent in his thinking that the main lines are to be made out clearly enough.  Building ever on that paramount obligation of all mankind to consider first the welfare of God’s plain people, he assumed that whenever by any course of action any congregation of men were thrown together and led to form any political unit, they were never thereafter free to disregard in their attitude toward that unit its value in supporting and advancing the general cause of the welfare of the plain people.  A sweeping, and in some contingencies, a terrible doctrine!  Certainly, as to individuals, classes, communities even, a doctrine that might easily become destructive.  But it formed the basis of all Lincoln’s thought about the “majority” in America.  Upon it would have rested his reply, had he ever made a reply, to the Virginia contention that while his theory might apply to each individual State, it could not apply to the group of States.  He would have treated such a reply, whether fairly or unfairly, as a legal technicality.  He would have said in substance:  here is a congregation to be benefited, this great mass of all the inhabitants of all the States of the Union; accident, or destiny, or what you will, has brought them together, but here