wing that he was in a
Republican stronghold, he dwelt with particular complacency upon the
manful way in which the Republican party had come to the support of
that principle, in the recent anti-Lecompton fight. It was this
fundamental right of self-government that he had championed through
good and ill report, all these years. It was this, and this alone,
which had governed his action in regard to the Lecompton fraud. It was
not because the Lecompton constitution was a slave constitution, but
because it was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas that he had
condemned it. "Whenever," said he, "you put a limitation upon the right
of a people to decide what laws they want, you have destroyed the
fundamental principle of self-government."

With Lincoln's house-divided-against-itself proposition, he took issue
unqualifiedly. "Mr. Lincoln asserts, as a fundamental principle of
this government, that there must be uniformity in the local laws and
domestic institutions of each and all the States of the Union, and he
therefore invites all the non-slaveholding States to band together,
organize as one body, and make war upon slavery in Kentucky, upon
slavery in Virginia, upon slavery in the Carolinas, upon slavery in
all of the slave-holding States in this Union, and to persevere in
that war until it shall be exterminated. He then notifies the
slave-holding States to stand together as a unit and make an
aggressive war upon the free States of this Union with a view of
establishing slavery in them all; of forcing it upon Illinois, of
forcing it upon New York, upon New England, and upon every other free
State, and that they shall keep up the warfare until it has been
formally established in them all. In other words, Mr. Lincoln
advocates boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North
against the South, of the free States against the slave States--a war
of extermination--to be continued relentlessly until the one or the
other shall be subdued, and all the States shall either become free or
become slave."[686]

But such uniformity in local institutions would be possible only by
blotting out State Sovereignty, by merging all the States in one
consolidated empire, and by vesting Congress with plenary power to
make all the police regulations, domestic and local laws, uniform
throughout the Republic. The framers of our government knew well
enough that differences in soil, in products, and in interests,
required different