party. Joining the new party, he became at once its leader in Illinois; to his own surprise, the second man in the balloting for its candidate for Vice-President in 1856 and its candidate for senator in 1858 against Stephen A. Douglas, the author of the repeal.

While Lincoln made ready for that campaign, as always in every hour of decision, he retired within himself. He consulted no one and gave no hint of his line of attack until he called together a dozen friends and, in a private rehearsal, read to them his opening speech, which began with these immortal words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing or all the other."

Every man in the little group warned him that the speech would defeat him for the Senate. "If I had to draw a pen across my record and erase my whole life from sight," he quietly replied, "and I had one poor gift or choice left as to what I should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it to the world unerased."

The Lincoln-Douglas debate is the old story over again of David and Goliath. Although physically Lincoln towered above the "Little Giant," who was hardly five feet four, Douglas had all but forgotten the country lawyer that he had left so far behind in his swift climb up the steeps of fame, and the brilliant senator patronizingly dismissed his antagonist now as a "kind-hearted, amiable gentleman, a right good fellow, etc., etc."

Lincoln modestly admitted that he had been a "flat failure" in the race of ambition on which the two men had started in Springfield twenty years before. "I affect no contempt," he added, "for the high eminence

he has reached. So reached that the oppressed of my species might have shared with me the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow."

Lincoln was transfigured by the great issue that had taken possession of him. Forgetting in his earnestness stage manners and platform tricks, his gestures were as simple as the words that he spoke in his high tenor voice, which sometimes ran almost into a piping falsetto or again softened into music.

Douglas carried a few more Legislative districts and was re-elected, but Lincoln led in the aggregate popular vote. As the defeated candidate was going home in the rainy election night he caught himself as he was about to lose his footing and, in his superstitious vein, he drew from the incident an omen: "It is a slip and not a fall."

Lincoln had met his Bunker Hill. The great unknown, who had dared to cross swords with the foremost champion of the repeal, piqued the curiosity of the country. Accepting an invitation to speak in New York, his Cooper Union address established his intellectual and moral right to lead the Nation.

Nevertheless when zealous neighbors had first entered him as a candidate for President, he protested. that he was not fit for the place. Until the convention of 1860 actually met in Chicago, his name seldom was mentioned for the honor outside his own State. Twothirds of the delegates really favored the nomination of William H. Seward, but, as so often happens in politics, the very pre-eminence of the New York senator made him unavailable. In the end Lincoln was nominated largely because he was the least-known man on the list of candidates.

As they reluctantly turned from Seward to cast their

ballots for Lincoln, some of the delegates actually shed tears for the great man that had fallen. Few dreamed that a greater had risen.

IV

CALLED TO THE HELM IN A STORM

(1860) Nov. 6, Abraham Lincoln elected President. The vote: Lincoln, Republican, 1,866,452; Douglas, Northern Democrat, 1,375,157; Breckinridge, Southern Democrat, 847,953; Bell, Constitutional Unionist, 590,631.-(1861) Feb. 11, Lincoln left Springfield. Feb. 23, arrived in Washington.

AFTER a campaign in which he remained silent in Springfield, except for a merely formal acceptance of the nomination, Lincoln received the news of his election to the Presidency with the bitter anguish of the nation's jeopardy in his heart and in his face the shadow of his awful responsibility. For Southern leaders had warned the country that the triumph of a minority candidate and of a sectional party, which did not put out a ticket in ten States of the South, would be the signal for breaking up the Union. The Republican party, falling far short of a majority, had won a four-cornered contest only because the Democrats had divided their votes between Douglas and Breckinridge, with a large remnant of the old Whig party voting for Bell.

As State after State made good the threat by withdrawing its representatives from Washington and by entering the Southern Confederacy, a moral, financial, and industrial panic shook the North. There rose a frantic clamor for letting the South go or for compromising with it again. Seward and a large section of the Republicans began to trim sails, and not less than forty measures for patching up a truce were proposed in Congress.

From the new captain came the clear command, "Hold firm as a chain of steel." While so many other Northern leaders were buffeted about like corks in a surf, Lincoln steered his steady course in the storm by two beacon lights: the Union, and the mandate of his election, which was to stop the spread of slavery beyond its existing boundaries.

Office-seekers and statesmen flocked to the simple village home in Springfield, where the President-electin "snuff-colored, slouchy pantaloons and open black vest with brass buttons"-let them in and talked with them while his two little sons noisily clambered over him. But he kept his own counsels. Without consulting any one or confiding in any one, he completed the outlines of his Cabinet, as he sat in the excited hurlyburly of the telegraph office election night. When the time came to write his inaugural, he retired into the solitude of a bare room over a store.

One day, as he and Mrs. Lincoln were busily unpacking some purchases which they had made in Chicago for their journey to Washington, and as he thought of the public fears that the rising tide of secession would engulf Virginia and Maryland and cut off the Presidentelect from the capital, the humor of the grim situation brought a twinkle to his eye and a pucker to his lips. "Well, Mary," he said, "there is one thing likely to come out of this scrape, anyhow. We are going to have some new clothes."

On the eve of his departure he made a journey to the home of his stepmother. He was loyally caring for the good woman who had brought sunshine into his desolate boyhood, whose faithful hands had clothed him and who had given him a chance to go to school and learn his letters. But her enjoyment of his visit was clouded with gloomy forebodings that his enemies

would kill him and that she never would see him again.

He had his own dark presentiments. On the day of his nomination he saw two reflections of himself in a mirror, one of them a pale shadow, and the superstition always present in this primitive man was aroused. On the night before he started for Washington, as he was sadly leaving his old law office for the last time and saying good-by to his partner, he foretold the fate that awaited him, that he would never come back alive. The people who had gathered at the railway station. the next morning to say good-by to him, saw him, as long as his train remained in sight, standing on the platform of his car, a melancholy figure, wistfully looking back at the vanishing little town into which he had walked a barefoot law student and where fame had sought him out.

An instance of the simple nature of the man, which occurred in the course of his journey, caused many smiles and as many sneers. Having adopted the advice of a little girl in a New York town, who wrote him a letter begging him to grow a beard on his hitherto clean-shaven face, he called for her when his train stopped at her station and told her, as he kissed her, that he had made the change at her request.

At Philadelphia there was a more solemn incident, touched with a tragic prophecy. In the unwonted emotions evoked by Independence Hall, where he spoke on Washington's Birthday, he was moved to declare that if the Union could not be saved without giving up the principles of the Declaration of Independence, he "would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

As the Presidential train neared Washington, Lincoln was met by a messenger from Seward and also by Allan Pinkerton, the noted detective, with the warning