It has often been suggested that his personal feelings towards Douglas played some part in the matter, though no one thinks they played the chief part.  Probably they did play a part, and it is a relief to think that Lincoln thoroughly gratified some minor feelings in this contest.  Lincoln no doubt enjoyed measuring himself against other men; and it was galling to his ambition to have been so completely outstripped by a man inferior to him in every power except that of rapid success.  He had also the deepest distrust for Douglas as a politician, thinking that he had neither principle nor scruple, though Herndon, who knew, declares he neither distrusted nor had cause to distrust Douglas in his professional dealings as a lawyer.  He had, by the way, one definite, if trifling, score to wipe off.  After their joint debate at Peoria in 1855 Douglas, finding him hard to tackle, suggested to Lincoln that they should both undertake to make no more speeches for the present.  Lincoln oddly assented at once, perhaps for no better reason than a ridiculous difficulty, to which he once confessed, in refusing any request whatever.  Lincoln of course had kept this agreement strictly, while Douglas had availed himself of the first temptation to break it.  Thus on all grounds we may be sure that Lincoln took pleasure in now opposing Douglas.  But to go further and say that the two men cordially hated each other is probably to misread both.  There is no necessary connection between a keen desire to beat a man and any sort of malignity towards him.  That much at least may be learned in English schools, and the whole history of his dealing with men shows that in some school or other Lincoln had learned it very thoroughly.  Douglas, too, though an unscrupulous, was not, we may guess, an ungenerous man.

But the main fact of the matter is that Lincoln would have turned traitor to his rooted convictions if he had not stood up and fought Douglas even at this moment when Douglas was deserving of some sympathy.  Douglas, it must be observed, had simply acted on his principle that the question between slavery and freedom was to be settled by local, popular choice; he claimed for the white men of Kansas the fair opportunity of voting; given that, he persistently declared, “I do not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down.”  In Lincoln’s settled opinion this moral attitude of indifference to the wrongfulness of slavery, so long as respect was had to the liberties of the privileged race, was, so to say, treason to the basic principle of the American Commonwealth, a treason which had steadily been becoming rife and upon which it was time to stamp.