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Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas. 1897.
Page 84
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he attempts to explain. And how does he explain? I will give him the benefit of his own language, precisely as it was reported in the Republican papers of that city, after undergoing his revision:—| | I have said a hundred times, and have now no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right and ought to be no inclination in the people of the Free States to enter into the Slave States and interfere with the question of slavery at all. |
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| He believes there is no right on the part of the free people of the Free States to enter the Slave States and interfere with the question of slavery, hence he does not propose to go into Kentucky and stir up a civil war and a servile war between the blacks and the whites. All he proposes is to invite the people of Illinois and every other Free State to band together as one sectional party, governed and divided by a geographical line, to make war upon the institution of slavery in the slaveholding States. He is going to carry it out by means of a political party, that has its adherents only in the Free States—a political party, that does not pretend that it can give a solitary vote in the Slave States of the Union; and by this sectional vote he is going to elect a President of the United States, form a Cabinet and administer the Government on sectional grounds, being the power of the North over that of the South. In other words, he invites a war of the North against the South, a warfare of the Free States against the slaveholding States. He asks all men in the Free States to conspire to exterminate slavery in the Southern States, so as to make them all free, and then he notifies the South that unless they are going to submit to our efforts to exterminate their institutions, they must band together and plant slavery in Illinois and every Northern State. He says that the States must all be free or must all be slave. On this point I take issue with him directly. I assert that Illinois has a right to decide the slavery question for herself. We have decided it, and I think we have done it wisely; but whether wisely or unwisely, it is our business, and the people of no other State have any right to interfere with us, directly or indirectly. Claiming as we do this right for ourselves, we must concede it to every other State, to be exercised by them respectively. | 14 |
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