crats were prompt
in their reply: Let the glorified policeman keep the peace and leave
private interests, such as slave-holding, alone. The Whigs evaded, tried
not to apply their theory of "strong" government; they were fearful
lest they offend one part of their membership if they asserted that
the nation had no right to abolish slavery in the District, fearful of
offending others if they did not. Lincoln's protest asserted that "the
Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia but the power ought not to
be exercised, unless at the request of the District." In other words,
Lincoln, when suddenly out of the storm and stress that followed Ann's
death his mentality flashes forth, has an attitude toward political
power that was not a consequence of his environment, that sets him
apart as a type of man rare in the history of statesmanship. What other
American politician of his day--indeed, very few politicians of any
day--would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and
the moral obligation not to use it? The instinctive American mode of
limiting power is to deny its existence. Our politicians so deeply
distrust our temperament that whatever they may say for rhetorical
effect, they will not, whenever there is any danger of their being taken
at their word, trust anything to moral law. Their minds are normally
mechanical. The specific, statutory limitation is the only one that for
them has reality. The truth that temper in politics is as great a factor
as law was no more comprehensible to the politicians of 1837 than,
say Hamlet or The Last Judgment. But just this is what the crude young
Lincoln understood. Somehow he had found it in the depths of his own
nature. The explanation, if any, is to be found in his heredity. Out
of the shadowy parts of him, beyond the limits of his or any man's
conscious vision, dim, unexplored, but real and insistent as those
forest recesses from which his people came, arise the two ideas: the
faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use
its might with infinite tenderness, that it should be slow to compel
results, even the result of righteousness, that it should be tolerant of
human errors, that it should transform them slowly, gradually, as do the
gradual forces of nature, as do the sun and the rain.

And such was to be the real Lincoln whenever he spoke out, to the end.
His tonic was str