undo the effect of Douglas. His fame traveled eastward. The culmination
of the period of literary leadership was his famous speech at Cooper
Union in February, 1860.

It was inevitable that he should go along with the antislavery coalition
which adopted the name of the Republican party. But his natural
deliberation kept him from being one of its founders. An attempt of
its founders to appropriate him after the triumph at Springfield, in
October, 1854, met with a rebuff.(1) Nearly a year and a half went by
before he affiliated himself with the new party. But once having made
up his mind, he went forward wholeheartedly. At the State Convention of
Illinois Republicans in 1856 he made a speech that has not been
recorded but which is a tradition for moving oratory. That same year a
considerable number of votes were cast for Lincoln for Vice-President in
the Republican National Convention.

But all these were mere details. The great event of the years between
1854 and 1860 was his contest with Douglas. It was a battle of wits,
a great literary duel. Fortunately for Lincoln, his part was played
altogether on his own soil, under conditions in which he was entirely at
his ease, where nothing conspired with his enemy to embarrass him.

Douglas had a far more difficult task. Unforeseen complications rapidly
forced him to change his policy, to meet desertion and betrayal in his
own ranks. These were terrible years when fierce events followed
one another in quick succession--the rush of both slave-holders and
abolitionists into Kansas; the cruel war along the Wakarusa River; the
sack of Lawrence by the pro-slavery party; the massacre by John Brown
at Pottawatomie; the diatribes of Sumner in the Senate; the assault on
Sumner by Brooks. In the midst of this carnival of ferocity came the