other towns was keen.  Sangamon County was bent on winning the prize for its own Springfield.  Lincoln was put in charge of the Springfield strategy.  How he played his cards may be judged from the recollections of another member who seems to have anticipated that noble political maxim, “What’s the Constitution between friends?” “Lincoln,” he says, “made Webb and me vote for the removal, though we belonged to the southern end of the state.  We defended our vote before our constituents by saying that necessity would ultimately force the seat of government to a central position; but in reality, we gave the vote to Lincoln because we liked him, because we wanted to oblige our friend, and because we recognized him as our leader."(3)

And yet on the great issues of the day he could not lead them.  In 1837, the movement of the militant abolitionists, still but a few years old, was beginning to set the Union by the ears.  The illegitimate child of Calvinism and the rights of man, it damned with one anathema every holder of slaves and also every opponent of slavery except its own uncompromising adherents.  Its animosity was trained particularly on every suggestion that designed to uproot slavery without creating an economic crisis, that would follow England’s example, and terminate the “peculiar institution” by purchase.  The religious side of abolition came out in its fury against such ideas.  Slave-holders were Canaanites.  The new cult were God’s own people who were appointed to feel anew the joy of Israel hewing Agag asunder.  Fanatics, terrible, heroic, unashamed, they made two sorts of enemies—­not only the partisans of slavery, but all those sane reformers who, while hating slavery, hated also the blood-lust that would make the hewing of Agag a respectable device of political science.  Among the partisans of slavery were the majority of the Illinois Legislature.  Early in 1837, they passed resolutions condemning abolitionism.  Whereupon it was revealed—­not that anybody at the time cared to know the fact, or took it to heart—­that among the other sort of the enemies of abolition was our good young friend, everybody’s good friend, Abe Lincoln.  He drew up a protest against the Legislature’s action; but for all his personal influence in other affairs, he could persuade only one member to sign with him.  Not his to command at will those who “recognized him as their leader” in the orthodox political game—­so discreet, in that it left principles for some one else to be troubled about!  Lincoln’s protest was quite too far out of the ordinary for personal politics to endure it.  The signers were asked to proclaim their belief “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to promote than to abate its evils."(4)