Lincoln on Democracy

"FREE SOCIETY Is NOT ... A FAILURE"

86 LINCOLN ON DEMOCRACY They tell us that we are in company with men who have long been known as abolitionists. What care we how many may feel disposed to labor for our cause? Why do not you, Buchanan men, come in and use your influence to make our party respectable? [Laughter.] How is the dissolution of the Union to be consummated? They tell us that the Union is in danger. Who will divide it? Is it those who make the charge? Are they themselves the persons who wish to see this result? A majority will never dissolve the Union. Can a minority do it? When this Nebraska bill was first introduced into Congress, the sense of the Democratic party was outraged. That party has ever provided itself, that it was the friend of individual, universal freedom. It was that principle upon which they carried their measures. When the Kansas scheme was conceived, it was natural that this respect and sense should have been outraged. Now I make this appeal to the Democratic citizens here. Don't you find yourself making arguments in support of these measures , which you never would have made before? Did you ever do it before this Nebraska bill compelled you to do it? If you answer this in the affirmative, see how a whole party have been turned away from their love ofliberty! And now, my Democratic friends, come forward. Throw off these things, and come to the rescue of this great principle of equality. Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties. And not to Democrats alone do I make this appeal, but to all who love these great and true principles. Come, and keep coming! Strike, and strike again! So sure as God lives, the victory shall be yours [Great Cheering.] "FREE SOCIETY Is NOT ... A FAILURE" From a Speech at Chicago, Illinois [DECEMBER 10, 1856] Lincoln gave this address to three hundred Republicans at a sumptuous political dinner at the Tremont House, replying to this toast amid what Lincoln and Slavery, 1854-1857 a friendly newspaper described as "most deafening cheers": "The Unionthe North will maintain it-the South will not depart therefrom." The month before, ex-president Millard Fillmore, now running as a thirdparty , Know Nothing candidate for the White House, had done well enough to ensure the defeat ofthe new Republican Party'sfirstpresidential nominee, John C. Fremont, and the election of Democrat James Buchanan . 87 Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a "central idea, " from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That "central idea" in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, "the equality of men." And although it was always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as [a] matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress towards the practical equality of all men. The late Presidential election was a struggle , by one party, to discard that central idea, and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right, in the abstract, the workings of which, as a central idea, may be the perpetuity of human slavery, and its extension to all countries and colors. Less than a year ago, the Richmond Enquirer, an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase, "State equality," and now the President, in his Message, adopts the Enquirer's catchphrase , telling us the people "have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States." The President flatters himselfthat the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so, indeed, it is, so far as the mere fact of a Presidential election can inaugurate it. To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will. All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But, in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore. Can we not come together, for the future. Let everyone who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not, and shall not be, a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he...