For the first time in American history “the slave has chosen a President of the United States,” he announced. “We have passed the Rubicon.” Although Lincoln, as Phillips stressed, was “not an abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man,” he nevertheless “consents to represent the antislavery idea,” for behind the “pulling of wires and creaking of wheels” that manufactured his election stood the true orchestrators of sectional politics—the abolitionists.
