o most of them contended justly, been true to principle in their
dealing with slavery. "They yielded to slavery," he insists, "what the
necessity of the case required, and they yielded nothing more." It
was, as we know, impossible for them in federating America, however
much they might hope to inspire the new nation with just ideas, to take
the power of legislating as to slavery within each existing State out
of the hands of that State. Such power as they actually possessed of
striking at slavery they used, as we have seen and as Lincoln recounted
in detail, with all promptitude and almost to its fullest extent. They
reasonably believed, though wrongly, that the natural tendency of
opinion throughout the now freed Colonies with principles of freedom in
the air would work steadily towards emancipation. "The fathers,"
Lincoln could fairly say, "place slavery, where the public mind could
rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction."
The task for statesmen now was "to put slavery back where the fathers
placed it."

Now this by no means implied that slavery in the States which now
adhered to it should be exposed to attack from outside, or the slave
owner be denied any right which he could claim under the Constitution,
however odious and painful it might be, as in the case of the rendition
of fugitive slaves, to yield him his rights. "We allow," says Lincoln,
"slavery to exist in the slave States, not because it is right, but
from the necessities of the Union. We grant a fugitive slave law
because it is so 'nominated in the bond'; because our fathers so
stipulated--had to--and we are bound to carry out this agreement." And
the obligations to the slave owners and the slave States, which this
original agreement and the fundamental necessities of the Union
involved, must be fulfilled unswervingly, in spirit as well as in the
letter. Lincoln was ready to give the slave States any possible
guarantee that the Constitution should not be altered so as to take
away their existing right of self-government in the matter of slavery.
He had remained in the past coldly aloof from the Abolitionist
propaganda when Herndon and other friends tried to interest him in it,
feeling, it seems, that agitation in the free States against laws which
existed constitutionally in the slave States was not only futile but
improper. With all his power he dissuaded his more impulsive friends
from lending any aid to forcible a