What his qualities showed him were two things: the alliance of the
plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the
essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people. Hence
his conclusion which became his party's conclusion: that, in the South,
a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This
was not the truth. Lincoln's defects in 1860 limited his vision.
Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near
horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error.
The palpable evidence all confirmed it. What might have contradicted it
was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit. Just
what a nature like Lincoln's, if only he could have met them, would have
perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas's, no matter
how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor
comprehend. It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom
his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing
Lincoln it was denied. In a word, the Southern reaction against the
Republicans, like the Republican movement itself, had both a positive
and a negative side. It was the positive side that could be seen and
judged at long range. And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to
him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.

The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see. He was too
far away to make out the details of the picture. Though he may have
known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites
were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known
that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many
as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere
handful--just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere
handfuls. But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority
which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and