l branches of the Democracy,--yet all, except Herndon, were alarmed
at this passage, and besought Lincoln to withhold it. But he answered
soberly and half-mournfully that it expressed his full conviction, and
he would face defeat rather than suppress it. In the immediate result,
it injured his cause; a general comment of Republicans, through the
campaign, says Herndon, was "Damn that fool speech!"

Douglas won the Legislature and the senatorship, though Lincoln won the
popular majority. When he was asked how he felt about his defeat, he
answered: "I feel as the boy did when he stubbed his toe,--he was too
big to cry, and it hurt too bad to laugh!" The country at large, which
had closely watched the debate, forgot him for two years. Early in 1860
he was invited to lecture in New York. He was not regarded as a
Presidential candidate; and when he appeared,--in clothes full of
creases from his carpet-bag, with no press copy of his speech and not
expecting the newspapers to report it--he was such a figure as to his
audience in Cooper Institute seemed to give little promise. But he
carried them with him completely, and the next morning the seven-column
report in the _Tribune_ told the country that in this man there was a
new force to reckon with. The speech ranks with the great historical
orations of the country. The first part was a careful review of the
position which the signers of the Constitution took in their individual
capacity as to the right of Congress to regulate or exclude slavery from
the territories. He showed by specific proof that of the thirty-nine
signers twenty-one voted definitely on various occasions for
Congressional Acts which did so exclude or regulate slavery; and that of
the remaining eighteen almost all were known to have held the same
opinion. This was a masterly refutation of the claim of Douglas and the
Democracy that the fathers of the nation were on their side as to the
territorial question. Lincoln then passed to a broader view, and
inquired: What can we do that will really satisfy the South? Every word
is sober, temperate, well-weighed. The South, he showed, is really
taking very little interest now in the Territories. It is excited about
the John Brown raid, and accuses the Republican party of responsibility
for that. But not a single Republican was implicated in the raid--not
one. You, said Lincoln, addressing the South--interpret your
constitutional rights in a different way from what we do