Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln In the celebrated debates with Stephen Douglas, held in 1858, he consistently advocated the restriction of slavery to the old States as the best means of ultimately extinguishing the peculiar, institution.' In point of fact, there was no other course possible except that of permitting slavery to be introduced wherever the Southern planters wished, and the growing strength of the anti Slavery party at the North rendered this impossible. There would have been no war if the South had been contented with the region' already in its possession for slave labour. Slavery would have died out gradually, but there would have been no irreparable loss inflicted upon any one generation, no destruction of property, and no confiscation. Mr. Lincoln and his Republi can friends calculated that it would take at least a hundred years to put an end to slavery by thus drawing a line round the area in which it was permitted to exist. But the South would not listen to any such arguments. It believed in its right to acquire portions of new States for the extension of its trade, with slavery as a part of it. That was the line taken by Stephen Douglas against Mr. Lincoln in the contest of 1858. The famous Dred Scott decision had apparently established the principle that Congress had no power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in territories, nor to authorize a legislature in a territory to prohibit it. While the battle was fought within the lines of the Constitution, no conclusive victory was possible for either side. It was the infatuation of the South alone which enabled the North to deal with the slavery question wholly outside the Constitution, and to.justify itself by the attempts to destroy the Constitution which the advocates of slavery put into Operation after the election of Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.