ure which most offended the Abolitionists, the
Fugitive Slave Law. He had appeared as counsel for a man who claimed
a runaway slave as his property.(2) None the less, the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill had brought him to his feet, wheeled him back from law into
politics, begun a new chapter. The springs of action in is case were the
factor which Douglas had overlooked, which in all his calculations he
had failed to take into account, which was destined to destroy him.

Lincoln, no less than Douglas, had sensed the fact that money was
becoming a power in American politics. He saw that money and slavery
tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity
in the American social system. "Humanity" had once been the American
shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity." And
the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich.
The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth.
Because of its place in this new coalition of non-democratic influences,
slavery, to Lincoln's mind, was assuming a new role, "beginning," as he
had said, in the Clay oration, "to assail and ridicule the white man's
charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and
equal.'"

That phrase, "the white man's charter of freedom," had become Lincoln's
shibboleth. Various utterances and written fragments of the summer of
1854, reveal the intensity of his preoccupation.

"Equality in society beats inequality, whether the latter be of the
British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort"(3)

"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B,
why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may
enslave A? You say A is white and B is black. It is color then; the
lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule
you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin
than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are
intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right
to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule you are to be slave to
the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. But, you
say, it is a question of interest, and if you make it your interest, you
have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his
interest, he has the right to enslave you."(4)

Speaking of slavery to a fellow lawyer, he said: "It is the most
gl