Mr. Lincoln tells you, in his speech at Springfield, "that a house divided against itself cannot stand; that this Government, divided into free and slave States, cannot endure permanently; that they must either be all free or all slave; all one thing or all the other." He also asks the question: Why didn't Trumbull propose to amend the bill if he thought it needed any amendment? As Rabbi Sacks has argued, the joining of social contract theory and covenantal thought in America allows, at its best, for both freedom and collective purpose, what Sacks calls integration without assimilation. I presume the truth is that Douglas put it in and afterward took it out. Now, let me ask you, which one of those questions on which Whigs and Democrats then differed now remains to divide the two great parties? I will venture to say that on all sides of the chamber it was so understood at the time. When the Legislature of this State assembled that year, they proceeded to pass resolutions approving the Compromise measures of 1850. I will cram the truth down any honest man's throat until he cannot deny it. I want to know whether he is for or against negro citizenship? In the northern part of the State I found Lincoln's ally, in the person of FRED DOUGLASS, THE NEGRO, preaching Abolition doctrines, while Lincoln was discussing the same principles down here, and Trumbull, a little farther down, was advocating the election of members to the Legislature who would act in concert with Lincoln's and Fred Douglass's friends. . Frank is right. This couple, Oscar Esche and his wife, had developed a passionate devotion to Abraham Lincoln, and they explain to Ferguson how it began. Thus I convict him of falsehood and slander by quoting from him on the passage of the Toombs bill in the Senate of the United States, his own speech, made on the night of July 2, 1856, and reported in the Congressional Globe for the first session of the thirty-fourth Congress, vol. At times they are in tension, and at times they sustain each other. On February 21, 1861, he arrived in Trenton, New Jersey. To believe in America, to have faith in America, and to be a person of faith in America, is to hope that even as we have lost the biblical grammar of liberty, nevertheless somewhere the covenantal lessons and legacy of Abraham and Sarah still live. I will read it: "Mr. Douglas-I have another amendment to offer from the Committee, to follow the amendment which has been adopted. Judge Douglas, in a general way, without putting it in a direct shape, revives the old charge against me in reference to the Mexican war. If you take this as one piece of evidence, and then ascertain that simultaneously Judge Douglas struck out a provision that did require it to be submitted, and put the two together, I think it will make a pretty fair show of proof that Judge Douglas did, as Trumbull says, enter into a plot to put in force a Constitution for Kansas without giving the people any opportunity of voting upon it. I will remark that I have not got these Congressional Globes with me. If Kansas should sink to-day, and leave a great vacant space in the earth's surface, this vexed question would still be among us. See more. He took it out, and although he took out the other provision preventing a submission to a vote of the people, I ask, why did you first put it in? That I take it is the truth about it. But a promise of God is like money in the bank. . The main point upon which I had been overruled was the question of population. In answer to some one in the crowd, who asked him a question, Trumbull said: "And you want to satisfy yourself that he was in the plot to force a Constitution upon that people? This impression was stronger because I thought the spirit of the bill infringed upon the doctrine of non-intervention, to which I had great aversion; but with the hope of accomplishing a great good, and as no movement had been made in that direction in the Territory, I waived this objection, and concluded to support the measure. It is true, as Judge Douglas states, that many Territorial bills have passed without having such a provision in them. You all remember that during the year 1854, these two worthy gentlemen, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Trumbull, one an old line Whig and the other an old line Democrat, were hunting in partnership to elect a Legislature against the Democratic party. Jaffa thought these two traditions were in a state of antagonism from the Founding, until they were melded by Lincoln’s magnificent mind. I am glad that I have at last succeeded in getting an answer out of him upon this question of negro citizenship and eligibility to office, for I have been trying to bring him to the point on it ever since this canvass commenced. We serve him everything.” At this point Mrs. Esche interrupts, correcting him in Thai. ". MR. DOUGLAS-Sir, if you will get a copy of the paper published at Waukegan, fifty miles from Chicago, which advocates the election of Mr. Lincoln, and has his name flying at its mast-head, you will find that it declares that "this paper is devoted to the cause" of Black Republicanism. Does he say this transcript from Trumbull's speech is a forgery? I am amazed that Mr. Lincoln should now come forward and indorse that charge, occupying his whole hour in reading Mr. Trumbull's speech in support of it. There are pictures of the Queen, of palaces. The next proposition that Judge Douglas puts is this: "But upon examination it turns out that the Toombs bill never did contain a clause requiring the Constitution to be submitted." He shall have no occasion to ever ask it again, for I tell him very frankly that I am not in favor of negro citizenship. . Now, Trumbull alleges that these last words were stricken out of the bill when it came back, and he says this was a provision for submitting the Constitution to a vote of the people, and his argument is this: "Would it have been possible to ratify the land propositions at the election for the adoption of the Constitution, unless such an election was to be held?" Wage slavery is a term describing a situation in which a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. [Enthusiastic cheering, "good, good. May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.” The biblically literate audience understood the allusion to the psalmist’s avowal, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.” Jerusalem was the site of the ark of the covenant. [Cries of "no, no."] The Founding to which Lincoln refers occurred in 1776 (“fourscore and seven years ago”): The Declaration of Independence. While I am here perhaps I ought to say a word, if I have the time, in regard to the latter portion of the Judge's speech, which was a sort of declamation in reference to my having said I entertained the belief that this Government would not endure, half slave and half free. If there be any dispute upon the fact, I have got the documents here to show they were there. In rejecting a larger mission for the United States, Hazony is clearly reacting to the war in Iraq. It looks to us as if he had altered the bill. If the charge which Mr. Lincoln makes be true against me, it is true against Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and every Whig President, as well as every Democratic President, and against Henry Clay, who, in the Senate or House, for forty years advocated bills similar to the one I reported, no one of them containing a clause compelling the submission of the Constitution to the people. As Adam Gopnik observes, it was actually Edward ­Everett, who preceded Lincoln at Gettysburg, who was classical in style; by contrast, “Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.”.