bewildering fusillade. He could not understand it. Something other than
mere Abolitionism had been aroused by his great stroke. But what was it?
Why did men who were not Abolitionists raise a hue and cry? Especially,
why did many Democrats do so? Amazed, puzzled, but as always furiously
valiant, Douglas hurried home to join battle with his assailants. He
entered on a campaign of speech-making. On October 3, 1854, he spoke
at Springfield. His enemies, looking about for the strongest popular
speaker they could find, chose Lincoln. The next day he replied to
Douglas.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill had not affected any change in Lincoln's
thinking. His steady, consistent development as a political thinker
had gone on chiefly in silence ever since his Protest seventeen years
before. He was still intolerant of Abolitionism, still resolved to leave
slavery to die a natural death in the States where it was established.
He defended the measure which most offended the Abolitionists, the
Fugitive Slave Law. He had appeared as counsel for a man who claimed
a runaway slave as his property.(2) None the less, the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill had brought him to his feet, wheeled him back from law into
politics, begun a new chapter. The springs of action in is case were the
factor which Douglas had overlooked, which in all his calculations he
had failed to take into account, which was destined to destroy him.

Lincoln, no less than Douglas, had sensed the fact that money was
becoming a power in American politics. He saw that money and slavery
tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity
in the American social system. "Humanity" had once been the American
shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity." And
the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich.
The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth.