Meanwhile, his hero, the hewer of rails and forger of homely speech,
Abraham Lincoln, had made a little tour eastward the year before, and had
startled Cooper Union with a new logic and a new eloquence. They were the
same logic and the same eloquence which had startled Stephen.

Even as he predicted who had given it birth, the Question destroyed the
great Democratic Party. Colonel Carvel travelled to the convention in
historic Charleston soberly and fearing God, as many another Southern
gentleman. In old Saint Michael's they knelt to pray for harmony, for
peace; for a front bold and undismayed toward those who wronged them. All
through the week chosen orators wrestled in vain. Judge Douglas, you
flattered yourself that you had evaded the Question. Do you see the
Southern delegates rising in their seats? Alabama leaves the hall,
followed by her sister stakes. The South has not forgotten your Freeport
Heresy. Once she loved you now she will have none of you.

Gloomily, indeed, did Colonel Carvel return home. He loved the Union and
the flag for which his grandfather Richard had fought so bravely. That
flag was his inheritance. So the Judge, laying his hand upon the knee of
his friend, reminded him gravely. But the Colonel shook his head. The
very calmness of their argument had been portentous.

"No, Whipple," said he. "You are a straightforward man. You can't
disguise it. You of the North are bent upon taking away from us the
rights we had when our fathers framed the Constitution. However the
nigger got to this country, sir, in your Bristol and Newport traders, as
well as in our Virginia and Maryland ships, he is here, and he was here
when the Constitution was written. He is happier in slavery than are your
factory hands in New England; and he is no more fit to exercise the
solemn rights of citizenship, I say, than the halfbreeds in the South