Lincoln, the unknown

LINCOLN THE UNKNOWN• 115Tales of sensuality so revolting that they could not be reprintednow, were broadcast in Abolition pamphlets then. Slaveownerswere accused of violating their own mulatto daughtersand selling them to be the mistresses of other men.Stephen S. Foster declared that the Methodist Church in theSouth had fifty thousand black female members who were forcedwith whips to lead immoral lives, and he declared that the solereason why Methodist preachers of that region favored slaverywas because they wanted concubines for themselves.Lincoln himself, during his debates with Douglas, declaredthat in 1850 there were 405,751 mulattoes in the United States,and that nearly all had sprung from black slaves and whitemasters.Because the Constitution protected the rights of slave-owners,the Abolitionists cursed it as "a covenant with death and anagreement with hell."As a climax to all Abolition literature, the wife of a povertystrickenprofessor of theology sat down at her dining-room tableand wrote a book which she called "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Sobbingas she wrote, she told her story in a storm of feeling.Finally she said God was writing the story. It dramatized andmade real the tragedies of slavery as nothing else had everdone. It stirred the emotions of millions of readers and achieveda greater sale and exerted a more profound influence than anyother novel that has ever been written.When Lincoln was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, thewoman that started the big war.author, he called her the littleAnd what was the result of this well-meant but fanaticalcampaign of overstatement waged by the Abolitionists of theNorth? Did it convince the Southerners that they were wrong?Far from it. The effect was such as might have been expected.The hatred stirred up by the Abolitionists did what hatredalways does: it bred hatred in return. It made the South wishto part company with its insolent, meddlesome critics. Truthseldom flourishes in an atmosphere of politics or of emotion,and on both sides of the Mason and Dixon's Line tragic errorhad grown to its bloody blossom time.When the "black Republicans" elected Lincoln in 1860, theSoutherners were firmly convinced that slavery was doomed,and that they had to choose at once between abolition and secession.So why not secede? Didn't they have a right to?That question had been hotly debated back and forth for half