The
Republican party sprang into being to meet the overruling call of the
hour. Then Abraham Lincoln's time was come. He rapidly advanced to a
position of conspicuous championship in the struggle. This, however, was
not owing to his virtues and abilities alone. Indeed, the slavery
question stirred his soul in its profoundest depths; it was, as one of
his intimate friends said, "the only one on which he would become
excited"; it called forth all his faculties and energies. Yet there were
many others who, having long and arduously fought the antislavery battle
in the popular assembly, or in the press, or in the halls of Congress,
far surpassed him in prestige, and compared with whom he was still an
obscure and untried man. His reputation, although highly honorable and
well earned, had so far been essentially local. As a stump-speaker in
Whig canvasses outside of his State he had attracted comparatively little
attention; but in Illinois he had been recognized as one of the foremost
men of the Whig party. Among the opponents of the Nebraska Bill he
occupied in his State so important a position, that in 1856 he was the
choice of a large majority of the "Anti-Nebraska men" in the Legislature
for a seat in the Senate of the United States which then became vacant;
and when he, an old Whig, could not obtain the votes of the Anti-Nebraska
Democrats necessary to make a majority, he generously urged his friends
to transfer their votes to Lyman Trumbull, who was then elected.
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