Judging from after effects, the audience quickly forgot these questioning thoughts.  They had but time to note Mr. Lincoln’s impressive stature, his strongly marked features, the clear ring of his rather high-pitched voice, and the almost commanding earnestness of his manner.  His beginning foreshadowed a dry argument using as a text Douglas’s phrase that “our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well and even better than we do now,” But the concise statements, the strong links of reasoning, and the irresistible conclusions of the argument with which the speaker followed his close historical analysis of how “our fathers” understood “this question,” held every listener as though each were individually merged in the speaker’s thought and demonstration.

“It is surely safe to assume,” said he, with emphasis, “that the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution and the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken together, do certainly include those who may be fairly called ’our fathers who framed the government under which we live.’  And, so assuming, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery in the Federal Territories.”

With equal skill he next dissected the complaints, the demands, and the threats to dissolve the Union made by the Southern States, pointed out their emptiness, their fallacy, and their injustice, and defined the exact point and center of the agitation.

“Holding, as they do,” said he, “that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing.  Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground, save our conviction that slavery is wrong.  If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away.  If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—­its universality!  If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—­its enlargement.  All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.  Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy....  Wrong as we think slavery is we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in the free States?  If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.  Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith