chance to have slavery
or freedom as it chose, and if in becoming a state it freely adopted a
slave constitution. As to these opinions Lincoln and Douglas were
agreed; for Douglas had fought the Kansas constitution because it forced
slavery on Kansas; and now the whole Buchanan administration in Illinois
was arrayed against Douglas for his attitude on Kansas, and Lincoln was
profiting by that.

How would Lincoln abolish slavery? By starving it, girding it about
gradually with freedom, keeping it where it was. That was all. What
would Douglas do? Referring to Lincoln's looking forward to a time when
slavery would be abolished everywhere Douglas said: "I look forward to a
time when each state shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses
to keep slavery forever, it is not my business but its own; if it
chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business not mine. I care
more for the great principles of self-government, the right of the
people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom. I would
not endanger the perpetuity of this Constitution, I would not blot out
the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that
ever existed."

What would Lincoln do about the fugitive-slave law? Douglas had
denounced attempts to evade it and actual violations of it. Even the
Whigs frowned on its nullification. What would Lincoln do? He was not in
favor of its repeal. He had said at Freeport: "I think under the
Constitution of the United States, the people of the Southern States are
entitled to a Congressional fugitive-slave law.... As we are now in no
agitation in regard to an alteration or modification of that law, I
would not be the man to introduce it as a new subject of agitation upon
the general question of slavery."

For the rest, what did it all come to? Like two pugilists Lincoln and
Douglas blocked each other's blows, drove each other into corners.
Lincoln twitted Douglas about being on both sides of the matter of
extending the Missouri Compromise. Then Douglas tripped Lincoln, who had
asserted that only slavery had ever disturbed the peace of the Union.
"How about the War of 1812, and the Hartford convention?" asked Douglas.
How about the tariff and South Carolina in 1832? He might have asked,
how about the Alien and Sedition laws and the Kentucky resolutions of
1798. But for the rest, what did it all come to?

Lincoln contended that Congress had the power to forbid slavery in the
terri