wretch at his heels, haunted Lincoln. He wept for the South in its self-inflicted moral
degradation.
It was because slavery made him miserable, and because he thought it was destroying the
nation, not least the South, that Lincoln reentered politics and helped to create the new
Republican Party, primarily to prevent slavery's extension. Looking back with the hindsight of
history, we tend to assume that slavery was a lost cause from the start and the destruction of the
old South inevitable. But to a man of Lincoln's generation, the South appeared to have won all
the political battles, and all the legal ones. So long as the Democratic Party remained united, the
South's negative grip on the United States seemed unbreakable, and its power to make positive
moves was huge. The creation of the Republican party, from free-soilers, Whigs, and many local
elements, was the answer to the Democratic stranglehold on the nation, which had been the
central fact of American political life since 1828. Lincoln failed to get into the Senate in 185 5
and (as we have seen) Buchanan won the presidency in 1856. But it was by then apparent that
the Republican Party was a potential governing instrument, and Lincoln's part in creating it was
obvious and recognized.
At Bloomington on May 29, 1856, when the new Illinois Republican Party was inaugurated,
Lincoln was called to make the adjournment speech and he responded with what all agreed was
the best speech of his life. It was so mesmerizing that many reporters forgot to take it down.
Even Herndon, who always took notes, gave up after fifteen minutes and threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour.' Lincoln argued that the logic of the South's case, which was that slavery was good for the negroes, would be to extend it to white men too. Because of the relentless pressure of the South's arguments, Northerners like Douglas, Lincoln warned, were now yielding their case ofthe individual rights of man'-'such is the progress of our
national democracy.' Lincoln said it was therefore urgent that there should be a union of all men,
of whatever politics, who opposed the expansion of slavery, and said he was ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power.' If the united opposition of the North caused the Southto raise the bugbear of disunion,' the South should be told bluntly, the union must be preserved in the purity o f its principles as well as in the integrity o f its territorial parts.' And he updated the reply of Daniel Webster to the South Carolina nullifiers, as the slogan of the new Republican Party:Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.' One
eyewitness said: At this moment, he looked to me the handsomest man I had ever seen in my life.' Herndon recalled:His speech was full of fire and energy and force. It was logic. It was
pathos. It was enthusiasm. It was justice, equity, truth and right set alight by the divine fires of a
soul maddened by the wrong. It was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath.’
It was now only a matter of time before Lincoln became the champion of the new Republicans.
The Senatorial election of 1858 in Illinois, when he was pitted against Douglas, the `Little Giant,'
provided the opportunity. On June 16 Lincoln, having been nominated as Republican candidate,
laid down the strategy at the state convention in Springfield. Together with the Bloomington
speech, it represents the essence of Lincoln's whole approach to the complex of political issues
which revolved round slavery. He said that all attempts to end both the South's agitation for the
right to extend slavery and the North's to abolish it had failed, and that the country was
inevitably moving into crisis:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot 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