I'm John Baxter, visiting with Professor Richard Cowardine, whose new book is Righteous

Strife.

This is the Battle of the Pulpit before the war begins and during the war and after the war

of civil strife in the 1860s.

Abraham Lincoln is president-elect.

He's watching this fast day, and it fails by all agreement.

The hope that Buchanan had was always iffy because he was mocked as weak.

Professor, the question of it failing and Lincoln watching this failure,

I note that Hodge, you mentioned Hodge of the Princeton Review,

hoped that the fast day would temper, quote,

the uncompromising spirit of the Republican Party. I knew that

Hodge thought the Republicans were aggressive. Did Lincoln think that too aggressive at this

moment before he was president? No. Lincoln did not think that the Republicans were too

aggressive. He recognized that there were radicals in the

party who took a position and had taken a position which was more radical and extreme than his own.

But he represented the central, as he would have put it, a constitutional respecting, constitution respecting center of the party.

He respected the South's right to its own institutions.

He understood that the constitution had been a compromise.

There was nothing in the constitution that allowed the federal government to make an assault on slavery.

Lincoln was very clear that it was the duty of the federal government to return slaves,

escape slaves, and to not make any kind of assault on the slaveholding potential of the South.

But what he did stand for was the restriction, the quarantining of slavery

...