ngs.

Mr. Lincoln had his weaknesses and limitations, like other men. All
must admit that his treatment of the slavery question was not without
its mistakes. It has always seemed to the writer that his most ardent
admirers seriously blunder in claiming superlativeness for him in that
regard, and more especially in giving him credit for results that were
due to the efforts of other men. His fame is secure without such
misappropriation. He would not ask it if living, and it will in due
time be condemned by history.

CHAPTER XIX

THE END OF ABOLITIONISM

The original and distinctive Abolition movement that was directed
against slavery in all parts of the land without regard to State or
territorial lines, and because it was assumed to be wrong in principle
and practice, may be said, as far as the country at large was
concerned, to have culminated at the advent of the Republican party.
To a considerable extent it disappeared, but its disappearance was
that of one stream flowing into or uniting with another. The union of
the two currents extended, but did not intensify, the Anti-Slavery
sentiment of the country. It diluted it and really weakened
it. It brought about a crisis of great peril to the cause of
Anti-Slaveryism--in some respects the most critical through which it
was called upon to pass. Many of those attaching themselves to the
Republican party, as the new political organization was called, were
not in sympathy with Abolitionism. They were utterly opposed to
immediate emancipation; or, for that matter, to emancipation of any
kind. They wanted slavery to remain where it was, and were perfectly
willing that it should be undisturbed. They disliked the blacks, and
did not want to have them freed, fearing that if set at liberty they
would overrun what was then free soil.

The writer recollects hearing a prominent man in the new party, who
about that time was making a public speech, declare with great
emphasis that, "as for the niggers, they are where they ought to be."
The speaker on that occasion was one of many who belonged to the
_debris_ of the broken-up Whig party, and who drifted into
Republicanism because there was no other more attractive harbor to go
to. One of these men was Abraham Lincoln, whom I heard declare in his
debate with Douglas at Alton, Illinois: "I was with the old-line Whigs
from the origin to the end of their party." The Whigs were never an
Anti-Slavery party. The recruits to Repub