THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the pro-slavery minority in Kansas fraudulently organized as a “Convention,” had not been submitted to a fair vote of the people, but had been eagerly welcomed by the pro-slavery cabal controlling the Buchanan Administration, and recommended to Congress for acceptance as the rightful constitution of Kansas. This attempt brought Douglas face to face with the question whether he would surrender his principle of “Popular Sovereignty” and the new State of Kansas to the slave-power and thus irretrievably ruin himself at the North, or repudiate the fraud by which Kansas was to be made a Slave State, and thus, just as irretrievably, forfeit the favor of the South, which he had hoped would lift him into the presidential chair. And it so happened that just at that time his term in the Senate expired and he had to appeal to the people of Illinois for a re-election. There he encountered the avenging angel in the person of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln and Douglas had met in public debate before—that is, the Whigs, and later the Republicans of Illinois, had regarded Lincoln as the fittest man to answer Douglas's speeches on the stump, and he had acted as their spokesman. Only the preceding year, in 1857, when Douglas, in a speech delivered at Springfield, Illinois, had made an attempt to wriggle out of the dilemma in which the Dred Scott decision had entangled him, Lincoln had, a week later, before a popular meeting held at the same place, thrust the sword of his logic through Douglas's adroit sophistries, and incidentally pronounced his famous vindication of the Declaration of Independence which deserves well to be remembered in the presence of latter-day problems. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain, and it was placed in the Declaration not for that but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, as, thank God, it
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