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A drunken marcher fell. The lights faded. We turned into the room. Douglas was laughing. What was the result? General Taylor had 1,360,099 votes and 163 electoral votes; Cass had 1,220,544 votes and 127 electoral votes. The Abolitionists polled 300,000 votes in the country. The Free Soilers had polled 291,263 votes in the country. Illinois was lost to General Taylor.
The Know-nothings arose and disappeared, without accomplishing anything. Greeley said of them that they were "as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or anti-potatobug party would be." In early 1854 the Whigs, Free Soilers and Anti-Slavery Democrats met at Ripon, Wisconsin, and proposed to form a new party, to be called the Republican party.
It was as much a violation of fundamental principle, a violation of popular sovereignty, to force a Constitution on an unwilling people for a day as for a year or for a longer time. If a few thousand Free Soilers had fabricated a Constitution in this fashion, prohibiting slavery forever, would the gentlemen from the South have submitted to the outrage?
The Whigs claimed to be "Free Soilers" as well as the party which appropriated that name, and Lincoln, in the first speech he made, defined carefully his position on the slavery question. This was at Worcester, Massachusetts, on September 12th. The Whig State convention had met to nominate a candidate for governor, and the most eminent Whigs of Massachusetts were present.
He was classed with the Free Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in 1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency, in steel and not in gold: "Pay ransom to the owner, And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him."
This election the Free Soilers declared illegal, because of fraudulent voting, and assembling at Topeka in the winter of 1855-56, they framed a constitution excluding slavery, and organized a rival government. Of this first Free-Soil Legislature father was a member.
It is a university built out of tariff privileges and railroad rebates; while Douglas' university was built from land, which Douglas was foresighted enough to buy in anticipation of Chicago's growth, and the increment in values produced by the Illinois Central railroad. Douglas was hotly denounced for crookedness and money grabbing in those days of 1858 by the Abolitionists and Free Soilers.
Then his great voice spoke again: "It is easy to have a war among ourselves." Reverdy looked at Douglas in a sort of terror. Just then Amos came to the door to call us to see a political parade which was passing the house. We three arose, joining Mother Clayton, Dorothy, and Mrs. Douglas who were already watching it. It was a demonstration of Free Soilers.
Cautious Northerners naturally hesitated to support him and face both the popular convictions on fugitive slaves and the rasping vituperation that exhausted sacred and profane history in the epithets current in that "era of warm journalistic manners"; Abolitionists and Free Soilers congratulated one another that they had "killed Webster". In Congress no Northern man save Ashmun of Massachusetts supported him in any speech for months.
All this was error. If Kossuth had been spurned by the Abolitionists and Free- soilers, he would not have been accepted by the South; for there was not a quadrennium from 1832 to 1860 when that section would have contributed to the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency with the weight of the Declaration of Independence upon his shoulders, as it came from his pen, had he been in existence and eligible to the office.
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