development of those forces of intellect and character which he soon
displayed on a broader arena.

It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired his wide
reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon the people of
what had now become the powerful State of Illinois, and upon the people
of the Great West, to whom the political power and control of the United
States were already surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern
States. It was this reputation and this impression, and the familiar
knowledge of his character which had come to them from his local
leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to present him
as their candidate, and to press him upon the Republican convention of
1860 as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life which was
before the nation.

That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible question of
slavery--and I must trust to your general knowledge of the history of
that question to make intelligible the attitude and leadership of Lincoln
as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final contest. Negro
slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from an early
period of their history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower landed
our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had discharged a
cargo of African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia: All through the
colonial period their importation had continued. A few had found their
way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient numbers to
constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power. At the time
of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there is no doubt that the
principal members of the convention not only condemned slavery as a
moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by the suppression
of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual extinction in the