During the various joint discussions held between the eloquent political orators who were chosen to represent the Anti-Slavery and Democratic parties, it may fairly be asserted that Lincoln opposed, while Douglas defended, directly or indirectly, the slave interests of the country.  The former always felt that slavery was wrong, and in seeking a remedy for the existing evil he followed in the footprints of Henry Clay.  He advocated gradual emancipation, with the consent of the people of the slave States, and at the expense of the General Government.  In his great speech against the Kansas and Nebraska bill, he said, “Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to its extension rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one.”

The debates between Lincoln and Douglas, especially those of the year 1858, were unquestionably the most important in American history.  The speeches of Mr. Lincoln, as well as of the “Little Giant” who opposed him, were circulated and read throughout the Union, and did more than any other agency to create the public opinion which prepared the way for the overthrow of slavery.  As another has said, “The speeches of John Quincy Adams and of Charles Sumner were more scholarly; those of Lovejoy and Wendell Phillips were more vehement and impassioned; Senators Seward, Hale, Trumbull, and Chase spoke from a more conspicuous forum; but Lincoln’s were more philosophical, while as able and earnest as any, and his manner had a simplicity and directness, a clearness of statement and felicity of illustration, and his language a plainness and Anglo-Saxon strength, better adapted than any other to reach and influence the common people,—­the mass of the voters.”

From 1847 to March 4, 1849, Mr. Lincoln served a term in Congress, where he acted with his party in opposing the Mexican war.  In 1855 he was a prominent candidate for the United States Senate, but was defeated.  From the ruins of the old Whig party and the acquisition of the Abolitionists, the Republican had been formed, and of this party, in Illinois, Mr. Lincoln became, in 1858, the senatorial candidate.  Again he was defeated, by his adversary Mr. Douglas.  Lincoln felt aggrieved, for he had carried the popular vote of his State by nearly 4,000 votes.  When questioned by a friend upon this delicate point, he said that he felt “like the boy that stumped his toe,—­it hurt him too much to laugh, and he was too big to cry.”

In his speech at Springfield, with which the campaign of 1858 opened, Mr. Lincoln made the compromisers of his party tremble by enunciating a doctrine which, they claimed, provoked defeat.  He said:  “’A house divided against itself cannot stand.’  I believe this Government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other; either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in a course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States,—­old as well as new, North as well as South.”