The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Thomas Thorne]

Dear Bill
Many thanks for the book advice.

The Nichols book was the first "big" book I ever read about the coming of the Civil War and I have been hooked ever since. I want to read Bestor.

Dred Scott repudiated both Lincoln and Douglas. C.J Taney accepted the Southern Rights tenets you have so excellently expressed:the extraterritoriality of slavery and the inability of any political entity other than a state to abolish slavery.

Lincoln believed that Congress had the right to and should prohibit slavery in the territories. Douglas believed that a territorial legislature at any time and independent of any state making process could legalize or prohibit slavery.

In creating Kansas-Nebraska the Northern and southern wings of the Democracy had very different conceptions of the issues described above and agreed to hide them. Douglas enjoyed the the support of many Southern Democrats at the Democratic Convention in 1856 and was careful not to reveal his true feelings about his conception of Popular Sovereignty.

At Freeport Lincoln's questions put Douglas in the position of having to antagonize someone. If he agreed with the Southern rights school, he would not be reelected to the Senate.If Douglas said what he truly believed,he would antagonize the South. Douglas had already earned Southern odium by leading the revolt against the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution which would have foisted slavery upon Kansas.
Tom