theorizer, in Lincoln it has
been rather to acclaim him as a strong, rough, practical man, and to
ignore the lucidity of thought which was the most marked quality of his
mind.

He was eminently practical; and he was not less but more practical for
realizing the supreme practical importance of first principles.
According to his first principles Slavery was wrong. It was wrong
because it was inconsistent with the doctrines enunciated in the
Declaration of Independence in which he firmly believed. Really good
thinking like Lincoln's is necessarily outside time, and therefore he
was not at all affected by the mere use and wont which had tended to
reconcile so many to Slavery. Yet he was far from being a fanatical
Abolitionist. Because Slavery was wrong it did not follow that it should
be immediately uprooted. But it did follow that whatever treatment it
received should be based on the assumption of its wrongness. An
excellent illustration of his attitude of mind will be found in the
exact point at which he drew the line. For the merely sentimental
opponent of Slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law made a much more moving
appeal to the imagination than the extension of Slavery in the
territories. Yet Lincoln accepted the Fugitive Slave Law. He supported
it because, as he put it, it was "so nominated in the bond." It was part
of the terms which the Fathers of the Republic, disapproving of Slavery,
had yet made with Slavery. He also, disapproving of Slavery, could
honour those terms. But it was otherwise in regard to the territorial
controversy. Douglas openly treated Slavery not as an evil difficult to
cure, but as a thing merely indifferent. Southern statesmen were
beginning to echo Calhoun's definition of it as "a positive good." On
the top of this came Taney's decision making the right to own slaves a
fundamental part of the birthright of an American citizen. This was much
more important than the most drastic Fugitive Slave Law, for it
indicated a change in first principles.

This is the true meaning of his famous use of the text "a house divided
against itself cannot stand," and his deduction that the Union could not
"permanently exist half slave and half free." That it had so existed for
eighty years he admitted, but it had so existed, he considered, because
the Government had acted on the first principle that Slavery was an evil
to be tolerated but curbed, and the public mind had "rested in the
belief that it was in process