Lincoln. After nine
exciting ballots, Matteson had forty-seven votes, Trumbull thirty-five,
Lincoln fifteen. As the bolting Democrats were beyond compromise,
Lincoln determined to sacrifice himself in order to defeat Matteson.
Though the fifteen protested against deserting him, he required them to
do so. On the tenth ballot, they transferred their votes to Trumbull and
he was elected.(8)

Douglas had met his first important defeat. His policy had been
repudiated in his own State. And it was Lincoln who had formulated the
argument against him, who had held the balance of power, and had turned
the scale.

IX. THE LITERARY STATESMAN

Lincoln had found at last a mode and an opportunity for concentrating
all his powers in a way that could have results. He had discovered
himself as a man of letters. The great speeches of 1854 were not
different in a way from the previous speeches that were without results.
And yet they were wholly different. Just as Lincoln's version of an old
tale made of that tale a new thing, so Lincoln's version of an argument
made of it a different thing from other men's versions. The oratory of
1854 was not state-craft in any ordinary sense. It was art Lincoln the
artist, who had slowly developed a great literary faculty, had chanced
after so many rebuffs on good fortune. His cause stood in urgent need
of just what he could give. It was one of those moments when a new
political force, having not as yet any opening for action, finds
salvation in the phrase-maker, in the literary artist who can embody it
in words.

During the next five years and more, Lincoln was the recognized offset
to Douglas. His fame spread from Illinois in both directions. He was
called to Iowa and to Ohio as the advocate of all advocates who could
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 h