Lincoln heard their condemnation with gravity rather than surprise. But
he had worked his way to a conviction, and he was immovable; all he said
was, that the statement was true, right, and just, that it was time it
should be made, and that he would make it, even though he might have "to
go down with it;" that he would "rather be defeated with this expression
in the speech ... than to be victorious without it." Accordingly, on the
next day he spoke the paragraph without the change of a word.
It is not without effort that we can now appreciate fully why this
utterance was so momentous in the spring of 1858.[77] By it Lincoln came
before the people with a plain statement of precisely that which more
than nine hundred and ninety-nine persons in every thousand, especially
at the North, were striving with all their might to stamp down as an
untruth; he said to them what they all were denying with desperation,
and with rage against the asserters. Their bitterness was the greater
because very many, in the bottom of their hearts, distrusted their own
painful and strenuous denial. No words could be more unpopular than that
the divided house could not permanently stand, when the whole nation was
insisting, with the intensity of despair, that it could stand, would
stand, must stand. Consequently occurrences soon showed his friends to
be right so far as concerned the near, practical point: that the
paragraph would cost more voters in Illinois than Lincoln could lose
without losing his election.
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