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Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Volume 2 (of 2)

by William Henry Herndon · English · Gutenberg #38484 · 574,192 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Volume 2 (of 2)

Author: William Henry Herndon
        Jesse William Weik

Commentator: Horace White


        
Release date: January 3, 2012 [eBook #38484]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38484

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE TRUE STORY OF A GREAT LIFE, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***




Produced by David Widger






ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The True Story of a Great Life

By William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik

With An Introduction By Horace White

In Two Volumes Vol. II

1896

THE LIFE OF LINCOLN.




CHAPTER I.

A LAW office is a dull, dry place so far as pleasurable or interesting
incidents are concerned. If one is in search of stories of fraud,
deceit, cruelty, broken promises, blasted homes, there is no better
place to learn them than a law office. But to the majority of persons
these painful recitals are anything but attractive, and it is well
perhaps that it should be so. In the office, as in the court room,
Lincoln, when discussing any point, was never arbitrary or insinuating.
He was deferential, cool, patient, and respectful. When he reached the
office, about nine o'clock in the morning, the first thing he did was
to pick up a newspaper, spread himself out on an old sofa, one leg on a
chair, and read aloud, much to my discomfort. Singularly enough Lincoln
never read any other way but aloud. This habit used to annoy me almost
beyond the point of endurance. I once asked him why he did so. This was
his explanation: "When I read aloud two senses catch the idea: first,
I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember
it better." He never studied law books unless a case was on hand for
consideration--never followed up the decisions of the supreme courts, as
other lawyers did. It seemed as if he depended for his effectiveness in
managing a lawsuit entirely on the stimulus and inspiration of the final
hour. He paid but little attention to the fees and money matters of the
firm--usually leaving all such to me. He never entered an item in the
account book. If any one paid money to him which belonged to the firm,
on arriving at the office he divided it with me. If I was not there,
he would wrap up my share in a piece of paper and place it in my
drawer--marking it with a pencil, "Case of Roe vs. Doe.--Herndon's
half."

On many topics he was not a good conversationalist, because he felt that
he was not learned enough. Neither was he a good listener. Putting it a
little strongly, he was often not even polite. If present with others,
or participating in a conversation, he was rather abrupt, and in
his anxiety to say something apt or to illustrate the subject under
discussion, would burst in with a story. In our office I have known him
to consume the whole forenoon relating stories. If a man came to see him
for the purpose of finding out something which he did not care to let
him know and at the same time did not want to refuse him, he was very
adroit. In such cases Lincoln would do most of the talking, swinging
around what he suspected was the vital point, but never nearing it,
interlarding his answers with a seemingly endless supply of stories and
jokes. The interview being both interesting and pleasant, the man would
depart in good humor, believing he had accomplished his mission. After
he had walked away a few squares and had cooled off, the question
would come up, "Well, what did I find out?" Blowing away the froth of
Lincoln's humorous narratives he would find nothing substantial left.

"As he entered the trial," relates one of his colleagues at the bar,*
"where most lawyers would object he would say he 'reckoned' it would be
fair to let this in, or that; and sometimes, when his adversary could
not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he 'reckoned' it
would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so. When he did object
to the court, and when he heard his objections answered, he would
often say, 'Well, I reckon I must be wrong.' Now, about the time he had
practised this three-fourths through the case, if his adversary didn't
understand him, he would wake up in a few minutes learning that he had
feared the Greeks too late, and find himself beaten. He was wise as a
serpent in the trial of a cause, but I have had too many scares from his
blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the whole thing
was unravelled, the adversary would begin to see that what he was so
blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep. By giving
away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case, and the
whole case hanging on the seventh, he traded away everything which would
give him the least aid in carrying that. Any man who took Lincoln for a
simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch."

     * Leonard Swett.

Lincoln's restless ambition found its gratification only in the field
of politics. He used the law merely as a stepping-stone to what he
considered a more attractive condition in the political world. In the
allurements held out by the latter he seemed to be happy. Nothing in
Lincoln's life has provoked more discussion than the question of his
ability as a lawyer. I feel warranted in saying that he was at the same
time a very great and a very insignificant lawyer. Judge David Davis, in
his eulogy on Lincoln at Indianapolis, delivered at the meeting of the
bar there in May, 1865, said this: "In all the elements that constituted
a lawyer he had few equals. He was great at _nisi prius_ and before an
appellate tribunal. He seized the strong points of a cause and presented
them with clearness and great compactness. His mind was logical and
direct, and he did not indulge in extraneous discussion. Generalities
and platitudes had no charm for him. An unfailing vein of humor never
deserted him, and he was able to claim the attention of court and jury
when the cause was most uninteresting by the appropriateness of his
anecdotes. His power of comparison was large, and he rarely failed in
a legal discussion to use that mode of reasoning. The framework of his
mental and moral being was honesty, and a wrong case was poorly defended
by him. The ability which some eminent lawyers possess of explaining
away the bad points of a cause by ingenious sophistry was denied him. In
order to bring into full activity his great powers it was necessary that
he should be convinced of the right and justice of the matter which he
advocated. When so convinced, whether the cause was great or small he
was usually successful." *

     * He never took advantage of a man's low character to
     prejudice the jury. Mr. Lincoln thought his duty to his
     client extended to what was honorable and high-minded, just
     and noble--nothing further. Hence the meanest man at the bar
     always paid great deference and respect to him.--David
     Davis, Sept. 10, 1866, MS.

This statement of Judge Davis in general is correct, but in some
particulars is faulty. It was intended as a eulogy on Lincoln, and as
such would not admit of as many limitations and modifications as
if spoken under other circumstances. In 1866 Judge Davis said in a
statement made to me in his home at Bloomington, which I still have,
"Mr. Lincoln had no managing faculty nor organizing power; hence a child
could conform to the simple and technical rules, the means and the modes
of getting at justice, better than he. The law has its own rules, and
a student could get at them or keep with them better than Lincoln.
Sometimes he was forced to study these if he could not get the rubbish
of a case removed. But all the way through his lack of method and
organizing ability was clearly apparent." The idea that Mr. Lincoln was
a great lawyer in the higher courts and a good _nisi prius_ lawyer, and
yet that a child or student could manage a case in court better than he,
seems strangely inconsistent, but the facts of his life as a lawyer will
reconcile this and other apparent contradictions.

I was not only associated with Mr. Lincoln in Springfield, but was
frequently on the circuit with him, but of course not so much as Judge
Davis, who held the court, and whom Lincoln followed around on the
circuit for at least six months out of the year. I easily realized that
Lincoln was strikingly deficient in the technical rules of the law.
Although he was constantly reminding young legal aspirants to study and
"work, work," yet I doubt if he ever read a single elementary law book
through in his life. In fact, I may truthfully say, I never knew him to
read through a law book of any kind. Practically, he knew nothing of the
rules of evidence, of pleading, or practice, as laid down in the
text-books, and seemed to care nothing about them. He had a keen sense of
justice, and struggled for it, throwing aside forms, methods, and rules,
until it appeared pure as a ray of light flashing through a fog-bank. He
was not a general reader in any field of knowledge, but when he had
occasion to learn or investigate any subject he was thorough and
indefatigable in his search. He not only went to the root of a question,
but dug up the root, and separated and analyzed every fibre of it. He
was in every respect a case lawyer, never cramming himself on any
question till he had a case in which the question was involved. He
thought slowly and acted slowly; he must needs have time to analyze all
the facts in a case and wind them into a connected story. I have seen
him lose cases of the plainest justice, which the most inexperienced
member of the bar would have gained without effort. Two things were
essential to his success in managing a case. One was time; the other a
feeling of confidence in the justice of the cause he represented. He
used to say, "If I can free this case from technicalities and get it
properly swung to the jury, I'll win it." But if either of these
essentials were lacking, he was the weakest man at the bar. He was
greatest in my opinion as a lawyer in the Supreme Court of Illinois.
There the cases were never hurried. The attorneys generally prepared
their cases in the form of briefs, and the movements of the court and
counsel were so slow that no one need be caught by surprise. I was with
Lincoln once and listened to an oral argument by him in which he
rehearsed an extended history of the law. It was a carefully prepared
and masterly discourse, but, as I thought, entirely useless. After he
was through and we were walking home I asked him why he went so far back
in the history of the law. I presumed the court knew enough history.
"That's where you're mistaken," was his instant rejoinder. "I dared not
trust the case on the presumption that the court knows everything--in
fact I argued it on the presumption that the court didn't know
anything," a statement which, when one reviews the decision of our
appellate courts, is not so extravagant as one would at first suppose.

I used to grow restless at Lincoln's slow movements and speeches in
court. "Speak with more vim," I would frequently say, "and arouse the
jury--talk faster and keep them awake." In answer to such a suggestion
he one day made use of this illustration: "Give me your little
pen-knife, with its short blade, and hand me that old jack-knife, lying
on the table." Opening the blade of the pen-knife he said: "You see,
this blade at the point travels rapidly, but only through a small
portion of space till it stops; while the long blade of the jack-knife
moves no faster but through a much greater space than the small one.
Just so with the long, labored movements of my mind. I may not emit
ideas as rapidly as others, because I am compelled by nature to speak
slowly, but when I do throw off a thought it seems to me, though it
comes with some effort, it has force enough to cut its own way and
travel a greater distance." This was said to me when we were alone in
our office simply for illustration. It was not said boastingly.

As a specimen of Lincoln's method of reasoning I insert here the brief
or notes of an argument used by him in a lawsuit as late as 1858. I copy
from the original:

"Legislation and adjudication must follow and conform to the progress of
society.

"The progress of society now begins to produce cases of the transfer
for debts of the entire property of railroad corporations; and to enable
transferees to use and enjoy the transferred property legislation and
adjudication begin to be necessary.

"Shall this class of legislation just now beginning with us be general
or special?

"Section Ten of our Constitution requires that it should be general, if
possible, (Read the Section.)

"Special legislation always trenches upon the judicial department; and
in so far violates Section Two of the Constitution. (Read it.)

"Just reasoning--policy--is in favor of general legislation--else
the legislature will be loaded down with the investigation of smaller
cases--a work which the courts ought to perform, and can perform much
more perfectly. How can the Legislature rightly decide the facts between
P. & B. and S. C. & Co.

"It is said that under a general law, whenever a R. R. Co. gets tired
of its debts, it may transfer fraudulently to get rid of them. So they
may--so may individuals; and which--the Legislature or the courts--is
best suited to try the question of fraud in either case?

"It is said, if a purchaser have acquired legal rights, let him not be
robbed of them, but if he needs legislation let him submit to just terms
to obtain it.

"Let him, say we, have general law in advance (guarded in every possible
way against fraud), so that, when he acquires a legal right, he will
have no occasion to wait for additional legislation; and if he has
practiced fraud let the courts so decide."

David Davis said this of Lincoln: "When in a lawsuit he believed
his client was oppressed,--as in the Wright case,--he was hurtful
in denunciation. When he attacked meanness, fraud, or vice, he was
powerful, merciless in his castigation." The Wright case referred to was
a suit brought by Lincoln and myself to compel a pension agent to
refund a portion of a fee which he had withheld from the widow of a
revolutionary soldier. The entire pension was $400, of which sum the
agent had retained one-half. The pensioner, an old woman crippled and
bent with age, came hobbling into the office and told her story. It
stirred Lincoln up, and he walked over to the agent's office and made
a demand for a return of the money, but without success. Then suit
was brought. The day before the trial I hunted up for Lincoln, at his
request, a history of the Revolutionary War, of which he read a good
portion. He told me to remain during the trial until I had heard his
address to the jury. "For," said he, "I am going to skin Wright, and get
that money back." The only witness we introduced was the old lady, who
through her tears told her story. In his speech to the jury, Lincoln
recounted the causes leading to the outbreak of the Revolutionary
struggle, and then drew a vivid picture of the hardships of Valley
Forge, describing with minuteness the men, barefooted and with bleeding
feet, creeping over the ice. As he reached that point in his speech
wherein he narrated the hardened action of the defendant in fleecing
the old woman of her pension his eyes flashed, and throwing aside his
handkerchief, which he held in his right hand, he fairly launched
into him. His speech for the next five or ten minutes justified the
declaration of Davis, that he was "hurtful in denunciation and merciless
in castigation." There was no rule of court to restrain him in his
argument, and I never, either on the stump or on other occasions in
court, saw him so wrought up. Before he closed, he drew an ideal picture
of the plaintiff's husband, the deceased soldier, parting with his wife
at the threshold of their home, and kissing their little babe in
the cradle, as he started for the war. "Time rolls by," he said, in
conclusion; "the heroes of '76 have passed away and are encamped on the
other shore. The soldier has gone to rest, and now, crippled, blinded,
and broken, his widow comes to you and to me, gentlemen of the jury,
to right her wrongs. She was not always thus. She was once a beautiful
young woman. Her step was as elastic, her face as fair, and her voice as
sweet as any that rang in the mountains of old Virginia. But now she
is poor and defenceless. Out here on the prairies of Illinois, many
hundreds of miles away from the scenes of her childhood, she appeals
to us, who enjoy the privileges achieved for us by the patriots of the
Revolution, for our sympathetic aid and manly protection. All I ask is,
shall we befriend her?" The speech made the desired impression on the
jury. Half of them were in tears, while the defendant sat in the
court room, drawn up and writhing under the fire of Lincoln's fierce
invective. The jury returned a verdict in our favor for every cent we
demanded. Lincoln was so much interested in the old lady that he became
her surety for costs, paid her way home, and her hotel bill while she
was in Springfield. When the judgment was paid we remitted the proceeds
to her and made no charge for our services. Lincoln's notes for
the argument were unique: "No contract.--Not professional
services.--Unreasonable charge.--Money retained by Deft not
given by Pl'ff.--Revolutionary War.--Describe Valley Forge
privations.--Ice--Soldier's bleeding feet.--Pl'ffs husband.--Soldier
leaving home for army.--Skin Def t.--Close." It must not be inferred
from this that Lincoln was in the habit of slopping over. He never
hunted up acts of injustice, but if they came to him he was easily
enlisted. In 1855 he was attending court at the town of Clinton,
Illinois. Fifteen ladies from a neighboring village in the county had
been indicted for trespass. Their offence consisted in sweeping down on
one Tanner, the keeper of a saloon in the village, and knocking in the
heads of his barrels. Lincoln was not employed in the case, but sat
watching the trial as it proceeded. In defending the ladies their
attorney seemed to evince a little want of tact, and this prompted one
of the former to invite Mr. Lincoln to add a few words to the jury, if
he thought he could aid their cause. He was too gallant to refuse and,
their attorney having consented, he made use of the following argument:
"In this case I would change the order of indictment and have it read
The State vs. Mr. Whiskey, instead of The State vs. The Ladies; and
touching these there are three laws: The law of self-protection; the law
of the land, or statute law; and the moral law, or law of God. First,
the law of self-protection is a law of necessity, as evinced by our
forefathers in casting the tea overboard and asserting their right to
the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. In this case it is the only
defense the ladies have, for Tanner neither feared God nor regarded man.
Second, the law of the land, or statute law, and Tanner is recreant to
both. Third, the moral law, or law of God, and this is probably a law
for the violation of which the jury can fix no punishment." Lincoln
gave some of his own observations on the ruinous effects of whiskey in
society, and demanded its early suppression. After he had concluded, the
Court, without awaiting the return of the jury, dismissed the ladies,
saying: "Ladies, go home. I will require no bond of you, and if any fine
is ever wanted of you, we will let you know."

After Lincoln's death a fellow-lawyer paid this tribute to him:* "He
was wonderfully kind, careful, and just. He had an immense stock
of common-sense, and he had faith enough in it to trust it in every
emergency. Mr. Lincoln's love of justice and fair-play was his
predominating trait. I have often listened to him when I thought he
would certainly state his case out of court. It was not in his nature to
assume or attempt to bolster up a false position.** He would abandon his
case first.

     * Joseph Gillespie, MS., Letter, Oct. 8, 1886.

     ** "Early in 1858 at Danville, Ill., I met Lincoln, Swett,
     and others who had returned from court in an adjoining
     county, and were discussing the various features of a murder
     trial in which Lincoln had made a vigorous fight for the
     prosecution and Swett had defended. The plea of the defense
     was insanity. On inquiring the name of the defendant I was
     surprised to learn that it was my old friend Isaac Wyant,
     formerly of Indiana. I told them that I had been Wyant's
     counsel frequently and had defended him from almost every
     charge in the calendar of crimes; and that he was a weak
     brother and could be led into almost everything. At once
     Lincoln began to manifest great interest in Wyant's history,
     and had to be told all about him. The next day on the way to
     the court house he told me he had been greatly troubled over
     what I related about Wyant; that his sleep had been
     disturbed by the fear that he had been too bitter and
     unrelenting in his prosecution of him. "I acted," he said,
     "on the theory that he was 'possuming insanity, and now I
     fear I have been too severe and that the poor fellow may be
     insane after all. If he cannot realize the wrong of his
     crime, then I was wrong in aiding to punish him.'"--Hon.
     Joseph E. McDonald, August, 1888. Statement to J. W. W.

He did so in the case of Buckmaster for the use of Dedham vs. Beems and
Arthur, in our Supreme Court, in which I happened to be opposed to him.
Another gentleman, less fastidious, took Mr. Lincoln's place and gained
the case."

A widow who owned a piece of valuable land employed Lincoln and myself
to examine the title to the property, with the view of ascertaining
whether certain alleged tax liens were just or not. In tracing back the
title we were not satisfied with the description of the ground in one
of the deeds of conveyance. Lincoln, to settle the matter, took his
surveying instruments and surveyed the ground himself. The result proved
that Charles Matheney, a former grantor, had sold the land at so much
per acre, but that in describing it he had made an error and conveyed
more land than he received pay for. This land descended to our client,
and Lincoln after a careful survey and calculation, decided that she
ought to pay to Matheney's heirs the sum which he had shown was due them
by reason of the erroneous conveyance. To this she entered strenuous
objections, but when assured that unless she consented to this act of
plain justice we would drop the case, she finally, though with great
reluctance, consented. She paid the required amount, and this we divided
up into smaller sums proportioned to the number of heirs. Lincoln
himself distributed these to the heirs, obtaining a receipt from each
one.*

     * "Dear Herndon:

     "One morning, not long before Lincoln's nomination--a year
     perhaps--I was in your office and heard the following! Mr.
     Lincoln, seated at the baize-covered table in the center of
     the office, listened attentively to a man who talked
     earnestly and in a low tone. After being thus engaged for
     some time Lincoln at length broke in, and I shall never
     forget his reply. 'Yes,' he said, 'we can doubtless gain
     your case for you; we can set a whole neighborhood at
     loggerheads; we can distress a widowed mother and her six
     fatherless children and thereby get for you six hundred
     dollars to which you seem to have a legal claim, but which
     rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to the woman
     and her children as it does to you. You must remember that
     somethings legally right are not morally right. We shall not
     take your case, but will give you a little advice for which
     we will charge you nothing. You seem to be a sprightly,
     energetic man; we would advise you to try your hand at
     making six hundred dollars in some other way.'

     "Yours,

     "Lord."

     From undated MS., about 1866.

While Mr. Lincoln was no financier and had no propensity to acquire
property,--no avarice of the get,--yet he had the capacity of retention,
or the avarice of the keep. He never speculated in lands or anything
else. In the days of land offices and "choice lots in a growing town" he
had many opportunities to make safe ventures promising good returns, but
he never availed himself of them. His brother lawyers were making good
investments and lucky turns, some of them, Davis, for example, were
rapidly becoming wealthy; but Lincoln cared nothing for speculation; in
fact there was no ventursome spirit in him. His habits were very simple.
He was not fastidious as to food or dress. His hat was brown, faded, and
the nap usually worn or rubbed off. He wore a short cloak and sometimes
a shawl. His coat and vest hung loosely on his gaunt frame, and his
trousers were invariably too short. On the circuit he carried in one
hand a faded green umbrella, with "A. Lincoln" in large white cotton or
muslin letters sewed on the inside. The knob was gone from the handle,
and when closed a piece of cord was usually tied around it in the middle
to keep it from flying open. In the other hand he carried a literal
carpet-bag, in which were stored the few papers to be used in court, and
underclothing enough to last till his return to Springfield. He slept in
a long, coarse, yellow flannel shirt, which reached half-way between
his knees and ankles. It probably was not made to fit his bony figure as
completely as Beau Brummers shirt, and hence we can somewhat appreciate
the sensation of a young lawyer who, on seeing him thus arrayed for the
first time, observed afterwards that, "He was the ungodliest figure I
ever saw."

"He never complained of the food, bed, or lodgings. If every other
fellow grumbled at the bill-of-fare which greeted us at many of the
dingy taverns," says David Davis, "Lincoln said nothing." He was once
presiding as judge in the absence of Davis, and the case before him was
an action brought by a merchant against the father of a minor son for
a suit of clothes sold to the son without parental authority. The real
question was whether the clothes were necessary, and suited to the
condition of the son's life. The father was a wealthy farmer; the bill
for the clothing was twenty-eight dollars. I happened in court just
as Lincoln was rendering his decision. He ruled against the plea of
necessity. "I have rarely in my life," said he, "worn a suit of clothes
costing twenty-eight dollars."

     * H. C. Whitney, MS., letter, Nov. 13, 1865.

"Several of us lawyers," remarked one of his colleagues, "in the eastern
end of the circuit annoyed Lincoln once while he was holding court for
Davis by attempting to defend against a note to which there were many
makers. We had no legal, but a good moral defense, but what we wanted
most of all was to stave it off till the next term of court by one
expedient or another. We bothered "the court" about it till late on
Saturday, the day of adjournment. He adjourned for supper with nothing
left but this case to dispose of. After supper he heard our twaddle for
nearly an hour, and then made this odd entry: 'L. D. Chaddon _vs_. J.
D. Beasley _et al._ April Term, 1856. Champaign County Court. Plea in
abatement by B. Z. Green, a defendant not served, filed Saturday at
11 o'clock A. M., April 24, 1856, stricken from the files by order
of court. Demurrer to declaration, if there ever was one, overruled.
Defendants who are served now, at 8 o'clock, P. M., of the last day of
the term, ask to plead to the merits, which is denied by the court on
the ground that the offer comes too late, and therefore, as by _nil
dicet_, judgment is rendered for Pl'ff. Clerk assess damages. A.
Lincoln, Judge _pro tem_."' The lawyer who reads this singular entry
will appreciate its oddity if no one else does. After making it one of
the lawyers, on recovering his astonishment, ventured to enquire,
"Well, Lincoln, how can we get this case up again?" Lincoln eyed him
quizzically a moment, and then answered, "You have all been so
'mighty smart about this case you can find out how to take it up again
yourselves."*

     * "During my first attendance at court in Menard County,"
     relates a lawyer who travelled the circuit with Lincoln,
     "some thirty young men had been indicted for playing cards,
     and Lincoln and I were employed in their defense. The
     prosecuting attorney, in framing the indictments,
     alternately charged the defendants with playing a certain
     game of cards called 'seven-up,' and in the next bill
     charged them with playing cards at a certain game called
     'old sledge.' Four defendants were indicted in each bill.
     The prosecutor, being entirely unacquainted with games at
     cards, did not know the fact that both 'seven-up' and 'old
     sledge' were one and the same. Upon the trial on the bills
     describing the game as 'seven-up' our witnesses would swear
     that the game played was 'old sledge,' and vice versa on the
     bills alleging the latter. The result was an acquittal in
     every case under the instructions of the Court. The
     prosecutor never found out the dodge until the trials were
     over, and immense fun and rejoicing were indulged in at the
     result."

The same gentleman who furnishes this last incident, and who was
afterward a trusted friend of Mr. Lincoln, Henry C. Whitney, has
described most happily the delights of a life on the circuit. A bit of
it, referring to Lincoln, I apprehend, cannot be deemed out of place
here. "In October, 1854, Abraham Lincoln," he relates, "drove into
our town (Urbana) to attend court. He had the appearance of a rough,
intelligent farmer, and his rude, homemade buggy and raw-boned horse
enforced this belief. I had met him for the first time in June of the
same year. David Davis and Leonard Swett had just preceded him. The next
morning he started North, on the Illinois Central Railroad, and as he
went in an old omnibus he played on a boy's harp all the way to the
depot. I used to attend the Danville court, and while there, usually
roomed with Lincoln and Davis. We stopped at McCormick's hotel,
an old-fashioned frame country tavern. Jurors, counsel, prisoners,
everybody ate at a long table. The judge, Lincoln, and I had the
ladies' parlor fitted up with two beds. Lincoln, Swett, McWilliams,
of Bloomington, Voorhees, of Covington, Ind., O. L. Davis, Drake, Ward
Lamon, Lawrence, Beckwith, and O. F. Harmon, of Danville, Whiteman, of
Iroquois County, and Chandler, of Williamsport, Ind., constituted the
bar. Lincoln, Davis, Swett, I, and others who came from the western part
of the state would drive from Urbana. The distance was thirty-six miles.
We sang and exchanged stories all the way. We had no hesitation in
stopping at a farm-house and ordering them to kill and cook a chicken
for dinner. By dark we reached Danville. Lamon would have whiskey in his
office for the drinking ones, and those who indulged in petty gambling
would get by themselves and play till late in the night. Lincoln, Davis,
and a few local wits would spend the evening in Davis's room, talking
politics, wisdom, and fun. Lincoln and Swett were the great lawyers, and
Lincoln always wanted Swett in jury cases. We who stopped at the hotel
would all breakfast together and frequently go out into the woods and
hold court. We were of more consequence than a court and bar is now. The
feelings were those of great fraternity in the bar, and if we desired
to restrict our circle it was no trouble for Davis to freeze out any
disagreeable persons. Lincoln was fond of going all by himself to any
little show or concert. I have known him to slip away and spend the
entire evening at a little magic lantern show intended for children.
A travelling concert company, calling themselves the 'Newhall Family,'
were sure of drawing Lincoln. One of their number, Mrs. Hillis, a good
singer, he used to tell us was the only woman who ever seemed to exhibit
any liking for him. I attended a negro-minstrel show in Chicago, where
we heard Dixie sung. It was entirely new, and pleased him greatly. In
court he was irrepressible and apparently inexhaustible in his fund
of stories. Where in the world a man who had travelled so little and
struggled amid the restrictions of such limited surroundings could
gather up such apt and unique yarns we never could guess. Davis
appreciated Lincoln's talent in this direction, and was always ready to
stop business to hear one of his stories. Lincoln was very bashful when
in the presence of ladies. I remember once we were invited to take tea
at a friend's house, and while in the parlor I was called to the front
gate to see a client. When I returned, Lincoln, who had undertaken to
entertain the ladies, was twisting and squirming in his chair, and as
bashful as a schoolboy. Everywhere, though we met a hard crowd at every
court, and though things were free and easy, we were treated with great
respect." Probably the most important lawsuit Lincoln and I conducted
was one in which we defended the Illinois Central Railroad in an action
brought by McLean County, Illinois, in August, 1853, to recover taxes
alleged to be due the county from the road. The Legislature had granted
the road immunity from taxation, and this was a case intended to test
the constitutionality of the law. The road sent a retainer fee of $250.
In the lower court the case was decided in favor of the railroad. An
appeal to the Supreme Court followed, and there it was argued twice, and
finally decided in our favor. This last decision was rendered some time
in 1855. Mr. Lincoln soon went to Chicago and presented our bill for
legal services. We only asked for $2000 more. The official to whom
he was referred,--supposed to have been the superintendent George B.
McClellan who afterwards became the eminent general,--looking at the
bill expressed great surprise. "Why, sir," he exclaimed, "this is as
much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged. We cannot allow such
a claim." Stung by the rebuff, Lincoln withdrew the bill, and started
for home. On the way he stopped at Bloomington. There he met Grant
Goodrich, Archibald Williams, Norman B. Judd, O. H. Browning, and other
attorneys, who, on learning of his modest charge for such valuable
services rendered the railroad, induced him to increase the demand to
$5000, and to bring suit for that sum. This was done at once. On the
trial six lawyers certified that the bill was reasonable, and judgment
for that sum went by default. The judgment was promptly paid.

Lincoln gave me my half, and much as we deprecated the avarice of great
corporations, we both thanked the Lord for letting the Illinois Central
Railroad fall into our hands.

In the summer of 1857 Lincoln was employed by Mr. Manny, of Rockford,
Ill., to defend him in an action brought by McCormick,* who was one
of the inventors of the reaping machine, for infringement of patent.
Lincoln had been recommended to Manny by E. B. Washburne, then a member
of Congress from northern Illinois. The case was to be tried before
Judge McLean at Cincinnati, in the Circuit Court of the United States.
The counsel for McCormick was Reverdy Johnson. Edwin M. Stanton and
George Harding, of Philadelphia, were associated on the other side with
Lincoln. The latter came to Cincinnati a few days before the argument
took place, and stopped at the house of a friend. "The case was one of
great importance pecuniarily," relates a lawyer** in Cincinnati, who
was a member of the bar at the time, "and in the law questions involved.
Reverdy Johnson represented the plaintiff. Mr. Lincoln had prepared
himself with the greatest care; his ambition was up to speak in the case
and to measure swords with the renowned lawyer from Baltimore. It was
understood between his client and himself before his coming that Mr.
Harding, of Philadelphia, was to be associated with him in the case, and
was to make the 'mechanical argument.'

     * The case, McCormick vs. Manny, is reported in 6 McLean's
     Rep., P. 539.

     ** W. M. Dickson.

After reaching Cincinnati, Mr. Lincoln was a little surprised and
annoyed to learn that his client had also associated with him Mr.
Edwin M. Stanton, of Pittsburg, and a lawyer of our own bar, the reason
assigned being that the importance of the case required a man of the
experience and power of Mr. Stanton to meet Mr. Johnson. The Cincinnati
lawyer was appointed for his 'local influence.' These reasons did not
remove the slight conveyed in the employment without consultation with
him of this additional counsel. He keenly felt it, but acquiesced. The
trial of the case came on; the counsel for defense met each morning for
consultation. On one of these occasions one of the counsel moved
that only two of them should speak in the case. This matter was also
acquiesced in. It had always been understood that Mr. Harding was to
speak to explain the mechanism of the reapers. So this motion excluded
either Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Stanton,--which? By the custom of the bar, as
between counsel of equal standing, and in the absence of any action of
the client, the original counsel speaks. By this rule Mr. Lincoln had
precedence. Mr. Stanton suggested to Mr. Lincoln to make the speech. Mr.
Lincoln answered, 'No, you speak.' Mr. Stanton replied, 'I will,' and
taking up his hat, said he would go and make preparation. Mr. Lincoln
acquiesced in this, but was greatly grieved and mortified; he took but
little more interest in the case, though remaining until the conclusion
of the trial. He seemed to be greatly depressed, and gave evidence of
that tendency to melancholy which so marked his character. His parting
on leaving the city cannot be forgotten. Cordially' shaking the hand of
his hostess he said: 'You have made my stay here most agreeable, and I
am a thousand times obliged to you; but in reply to your request for
me to come again, I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati
again. I have nothing against the city, but things have so happened
here as to make it undesirable for me ever to return.' Lincoln felt that
Stanton had not only been very discourteous to him, but had purposely
ignored him in the case, and that he had received rather rude, if not
unkind, treatment from all hands. Stanton, in his brusque and abrupt
way, it is said, described him as a 'long, lank creature from Illinois,
wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the
perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the
continent. Mr. Lincoln," adds Mr. Dickson, "remained in Cincinnati about
a week, moving freely around, yet not twenty men knew him personally or
knew he was here; not a hundred would have known who he was had his
name been given to them. He came with the fond hope of making fame in a
forensic contest with Reverdy Johnson. He was pushed aside, humiliated
and mortified. He attached to the innocent city the displeasure that
filled his bosom, and shook its dust from his feet." On his return to
Springfield he was somewhat reticent regarding the trial, and, contrary
to his custom, communicated to his associates at the bar but few of its
incidents. He told me that he had been "roughly handled by that man
Stanton"; that he overheard the latter from an adjoining room, while the
door was slightly ajar, referring to Lincoln, inquire of another, "Where
did that long-armed creature come from, and what can he expect to do in
this case?" During the trial Lincoln formed a poor opinion of Judge
McLean. He characterized him as an "old granny," with considerable vigor
of mind, but no perception at all. "If you were to point your finger at
him," he put it, "and a darning needle at the same time he never would
know which was the sharpest."

As Lincoln grew into public favor and achieved such marked success in
the profession, half the bar of Springfield began to be envious of his
growing popularity. I believe there is less jealousy and bitter feeling
among lawyers than professional men of any other class; but it should
be borne in mind that in that early day a portion of the bar in
every county seat, if not a majority of the lawyers everywhere, were
politicians. Stuart frequently differed from Lincoln on political
questions, and was full of envy. Likewise those who coincided with
Lincoln in his political views were disturbed in the same way. Even
Logan was not wholly free from the degrading passion. But in this
respect Lincoln suffered no more than other great characters who
preceded him in the world's history.

That which Lincoln's adversaries in a lawsuit feared most of all was
his apparent disregard of custom or professional propriety in managing a
case before a jury. He brushed aside all rules, and very often resorted
to some strange and strategic performance which invariably broke his
opponent down or exercised some peculiar influence over the jury. Hence
the other side in a case were in constant fear of one of his dramatic
strokes, or trembled lest he should "ring in" some ingeniously planned
interruption not on the programme. In a case where Judge Logan--always
earnest and grave--opposed him, Lincoln created no little merriment
by his reference to Logan's style of dress. He carried the surprise
in store for the latter, till he reached his turn before the jury.
Addressing them, he said: "Gentlemen, you must be careful and not permit
yourselves to be overcome by the eloquence of counsel for the defense.
Judge Logan, I know, is an effective lawyer. I have met him too often to
doubt that; but shrewd and careful though he be, still he is sometimes
wrong. Since this trial has begun I have discovered that, with all his
caution and fastidiousness, he hasn't knowledge enough to put his shirt
on right." Logan turned red as crimson, but sure enough, Lincoln was
correct, for the former had donned a new shirt, and by mistake had drawn
it over his head with the pleated bosom behind. The general laugh which
followed destroyed the effect of Logan's eloquence over the jury--the
very point at which Lincoln aimed.

The trial of William Armstrong* for the murder of James P. Metzger,
in May, 1858, at Beardstown, Illinois, in which Lincoln secured the
acquittal of the defendant, was one of the gratifying triumphs in his
career as a lawyer.

     * This incident in Lincoln's career has been most happily
     utilized by Dr. Edward Eggleston in his story "The
     Graysons," recently published in the Century Magazine.

Lincoln's defense, wherein he floored the principal prosecuting witness,
who had testified positively to seeing the fatal blow struck in the
moonlight, by showing from an almanac that the moon had set, was
not more convincing than his eloquent and irresistible appeal in his
client's favor. The latter's mother, old Hannah Armstrong, the friend
of his youth, had solicited him to defend her son. "He told the jury,"
relates the prosecuting attorney, "of his once being a poor, friendless
boy; that Armstrong's parents took him into their house, fed and clothed
him, and gave him a home. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. The
sight of his tall, quivering frame, and the particulars of the story he
so pathetically told, moved the jury to tears also, and they forgot the
guilt of the defendant in their admiration of his advocate. It was the
most touching scene I ever witnessed."*

     * J. Henry Shaw, letter, Aug. 22, 1866, MS.

Before passing it may be well to listen to the humble tribute of old
Hannah Armstrong, the defendant's mother: "Lincoln had said to
me, 'Hannah, your son will be cleared before sundown.' I left the
court-room, and they came and told me that my son was cleared and a free
man. I went up to the court-house. The jury shook hands with me; so did
the judge and Lincoln; tears streamed down Lincoln's eyes.... After
the trial I asked him what his fee would be; told him I was poor. 'Why,
Hannah,' he said, 'I sha'n't charge you a cent, and anything else I
can do for you, will do it willingly and without charge.' He afterwards
wrote to me about a piece of land which certain men were trying to get
from me, and said: 'Hannah, they can't get your land. Let them try it in
the Circuit Court, and then you appeal it; bring it to the Supreme Court
and I and Herndon will attend to it for nothing.'" *

The last suit of any importance in which Lincoln was personally engaged,
was known as the Johnson sand-bar case. It involved the title to certain
lands, the accretion on the shores of Lake Michigan, in or near Chicago.
It was tried in the United States Circuit Court at Chicago in April
and May, 1860. During the trial, the Court--Judge Drummond--and all
the counsel on both sides dined at the residence of Isaac N. Arnold,
afterwards a member of Congress. "Douglas and Lincoln," relates Mr.
Arnold, "were at the time both candidates for the nomination for
President. There were active and ardent political friends of each at the
table, and when the sentiment was proposed, 'May Illinois furnish the
next President,' it was drank with enthusiasm by the friends of both
Lincoln and Douglas."**

     * From statement, Nov. 24, 1865.

     ** Arnold's "Lincoln," p. 90.

I could fill this volume with reminiscences of Lincoln's career as a
lawyer, but lest the reader should tire of what must savor in many cases
of monotony it is best to move on. I have made this portion of the book
rather full; but as Lincoln's individuality and peculiarities were more
marked in the law office and court-room than anywhere else it will play
its part in making up the picture of the man. Enough has been told to
show how, in the face of adverse fortune and the lack of early training,
and by force of his indomitable will and self-confidence, he gained such
ascendency among the lawyers of Illinois. The reader is enabled thereby
to understand the philosophy of his growth.

But now another field is preparing to claim him. There will soon be
great need for his clear reason, masterly mind and heroic devotion to
principle. The distant mutterings of an approaching contest are
driving scattered factions into a union of sentiment and action. As
the phalanxes of warriors are preparing for action, amid the rattle
of forensic musketry, Lincoln, their courageous leader, equipped for
battle, springs into view.




CHAPTER II.

WHILE Lincoln in a certain sense was buried in the law from the time his
career in Congress closed till, to use his own words, "the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise aroused him again," yet he was a careful student of
his times and kept abreast of the many and varied movements in politics.
He was generally on the Whig electoral tickets, and made himself heard
during each successive canvas,* but he seemed to have lost that zealous
interest in politics which characterized his earlier days. He plodded
on unaware of, and seemingly without ambition for, the great distinction
that lay in store for him.

     * In the campaign of 1852, when Pierce was the Democratic
     candidate for President, Douglas made speeches for him in
     almost every State in the Union. His "key-note" was sounded
     at Richmond, Va. Lincoln, whose reputation was limited by
     the boundaries of Illinois, was invited by the Scott Club of
     Springfield to answer it, but his soul and heart were not in
     the undertaking. He had not yet been awakened, and,
     considering it entire, the speech was a poor effort. Another
     has truthfully said of it, "If it was distinguished by one
     quality above another it was by its attempts at humor, and
     all those attempts were strained and affected, as well as
     very coarse. He displayed a jealous and petulant temper from
     the first to the last, wholly beneath the dignity of the
     occasion and the importance of the topic. Considered as a
     whole it may be said that none of his public performances
     was more unworthy of its really noble author than this one.
     The closing paragraph will serve as a fair sample of the
     entire speech: "Let us stand by our candidate [Gen. Scott]
     as faithfully as he has always stood by our country, and I
     much doubt if we do not perceive a slight abatement of Judge
     Douglas's confidence in Providence as well as the people. I
     suspect that confidence is not more firmly fixed with the
     Judge than it was with the old woman whose horse ran away
     with her in a buggy. She said she trusted in Providence till
     the 'britchen' broke, and then she didn't know what on
     'airth' to do. The chance is the Judge will see the
     'britchen' broke, and then he can at his leisure bewail the
     fate of Locofocoism as the victim of misplaced confidence."

John T. Stuart relates* that, as he and Lincoln were returning from the
court in Tazewell county in 1850, and were nearing the little town of
Dillon, they engaged in a discussion of the political situation.

     * Statement, J. T. S., MS., July 21, 1865.

"As we were coming down the hill," are Stuart's words, "I said,
'Lincoln, the time is coming when we shall have to be all either
Abolitionists or Democrats.' He thought a moment and then answered,
ruefully and emphatically, 'When that time comes my mind is made up, for
I believe the slavery question can never be successfully compromised.'
I responded with equal emphasis, 'My mind is made up too.'" Thus it was
with Lincoln. But he was too slow to suit the impetuous demand of
the few pronounced Abolitionists whom he met in his daily walks. The
sentiment of the majority in Springfield tended in the other direction,
and, thus environed, Lincoln lay down like the sleeping lion. The future
would yet arouse him. At that time I was an ardent Abolitionist in
sentiment. I used to warn Lincoln against his apparent conservatism
when the needs of the hour were so great; but his only answer would be,
'Billy, you're too rampant and spontaneous.' I was in correspondence
with Sumner, Greeley, Phillips, and Garrison, and was thus thoroughly
imbued with all the rancor drawn from such strong anti-slavery sources.
I adhered to Lincoln, relying on the final outcome of his sense of
justice and right. Every time a good speech on the great issue was made
I sent for it. Hence you could find on my table the latest utterances
of Giddings, Phillips, Sumner, Seward, and one whom I considered grander
than all the others--Theodore Parker. Lincoln and I took such papers
as the _Chicago Tribune, New York Tribune, Anti-Slavery Standard,
Emancipator, and National Era_. On the other side of the question we
took the _Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Enquirer_. I also bought
a book called "Sociology," written by one Fitzhugh, which defended and
justified slavery in every conceivable way. In addition I purchased all
the leading histories of the slavery movement, and other works which
treated on that subject. Lincoln himself never bought many books, but he
and I both read those I have named. After reading them we would discuss
the questions they touched upon and the ideas they suggested, from our
different points of view. I was never conscious of having made much of
an impression on Mr. Lincoln, nor do I believe I ever changed his
views. I will go further and say, that, from the profound nature of his
conclusions and the labored method by which he arrived at them, no man
is entitled to the credit of having either changed or greatly modified
them. I remember once, after having read one of Theodore Parker's
sermons on slavery, saying to Mr. Lincoln substantially this: "I have
always noticed that ill-gotten wealth does no man any good. This is as
true of nations as individuals. I believe that all the ill-gotten gain
wrenched by us from the negro through his enslavement will eventually be
taken from us, and we will be set back where we began." Lincoln thought
my prophecy rather direful. He doubted seriously if either of us would
live to see the righting of so great a wrong; but years after, when
writing his second Inaugural address, he endorsed the idea. Clothing it
in the most beautiful language, he says: "Yet if God wills that it [ the
war ] continue till all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop
of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" The passage
in May, 1854, of the Kansas-Nebraska bill swept out of sight the
Missouri Compromise and the Compromise measures of 1850. This bill,
designed and carried through by Douglas, was regarded by him as the
masterpiece of all his varied achievements in legislation. It served to
prove more clearly than anything he had ever before done his flexibility
and want of political conscience. Although in years gone before he had
invoked the vengeance of Heaven on the ruthless hand that should dare to
disturb the sanctity of the compact of 1821, yet now he was the arrogant
and audacious leader in the very work he had so heartily condemned. When
we consider the bill and the unfortunate results which followed it in
the border States we are irresistibly led to conclude that it was, all
things considered, a great public wrong and a most lamentable piece of
political jugglery. The stump speech which Thomas H. Benton charged that
Douglas had "injected into the belly of the bill" contains all there was
of Popular Sovereignty--"It being the true intent and meaning of this
act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State nor to exclude
it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and
regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only
to the Constitution of the United States," an argument which, using
Lincoln's words, "amounts to this: That if any one man chooses to
enslave another no third man shall be allowed to object." The widespread
feeling the passage of this law aroused everywhere over the Union is
a matter of general history. It stirred up in New England the latent
hostility to the aggression of slavery; it stimulated to extraordinary
endeavors the derided Abolitionists, arming them with new weapons; it
sounded the death-knell of the gallant old Whig party; it drove together
strange, discordant elements in readiness to fight a common enemy; it
brought to the forefront a leader in the person of Lincoln.

The revolt of Cook, Judd, and Palmer, all young and progressive,
from the Democratic majority in the Legislature was the first sign of
discontent in Illinois. The rude and partly hostile reception of
Douglas, on his arrival in Chicago, did not in any degree tend to
allay the feeling of disapproval so general in its manifestation. The
warriors, young and old, removed their armor from the walls, and began
preparations for the impending conflict. Lincoln had made a few speeches
in aid of Scott during the campaign of 1852, but they were efforts
entirely unworthy of the man. Now, however, a live issue was presented
to him. No one realized this sooner than he. In the office discussions
he grew bolder in his utterances. He insisted that the social and
political difference between slavery and freedom was becoming more
marked; that one must overcome the other; and that postponing the
struggle between them would only make it the more deadly in the end.
"The day of compromise," he still contended, "has passed. These two
great ideas have been kept apart only by the most artful means. They are
like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart.
Some day these deadly antagonists will one or the other break their
bonds, and then the question will be settled." In a conversation with
a fellow-lawyer* he said of slavery: "It is the most glittering,
ostentatious, and displaying property in the world, and now, if a
young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his
lady-love owns. The love for slave property is swallowing up every
other mercenary possession. Slavery is a great and crying injustice--an
enormous national crime." At another time he made the observation that
it was "singular that the courts would hold that a man never lost
his right to his property that had been stolen from him, but that he
instantly lost his right to himself if he was stolen." It is useless to
add more evidence--for it could be piled mountain high--showing that at
the very outset Mr. Lincoln was sound to the core on the injustice and
crime of human slavery.

     * Joseph Gillespie, MS. letter, June 9,'66.

After a brief rest at his home in Chicago Mr. Douglas betook himself to
the country, and in October, during the week of the State Fair, we
find him in Springfield. On Tuesday he made a speech in the State House
which, in view of the hostile attitude of some of his own party
friends, was a labored defense of his position. It was full of ingenious
sophistry and skilful argument. An unprecedented concourse of people had
gathered from all parts of the State, and Douglas, fresh from the halls
of Congress, was the lion of the hour. On the following day Mr. Lincoln,
as the champion of the opponents of Popular Sovereignty, was selected
to represent those who disagreed with the new legislation, and to answer
Douglas. His speech encouraged his friends no less than it startled his
enemies. At this time I was zealously interested in the new movement,
and not less so in Lincoln. I frequently wrote the editorials in the
Springfield _Journal_ the editor, Simeon Francis, giving to Lincoln and
to me the utmost liberty in that direction. Occasionally Lincoln would
write out matter for publication, but I believe I availed myself of the
privilege oftener than he. The editorial in the issue containing the
speeches of Lincoln and Douglas on this occasion was my own, and
while in description it may seem rather strongly imbued with youthful
enthusiasm, yet on reading it in maturer years I am still inclined to
believe it reasonably faithful to the facts and the situation. "The
anti-Nebraska speech of Mr. Lincoln," says the article, "was the
profoundest in our opinion that he has made in his whole life. He felt
upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered, and all present felt
that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice swelled
within, and came near stifling utterance. He quivered with emotion. The
whole house was as still as death. He attacked the Nebraska bill with
unusual warmth and energy; and all felt that a man of strength was its
enemy, and that he intended to blast it if he could by strong and manly
efforts. He was most successful, and the house approved the glorious
triumph of truth by loud and continued huzzas. Women waved their white
handkerchiefs in token of woman's silent but heartfelt assent. Douglas
felt the sting; the animal within him was roused because he frequently
interrupted Mr. Lincoln. His friends felt that he was crushed by
Lincoln's powerful argument, manly logic, and illustrations from nature
around us. The Nebraska bill was shivered, and like a tree of the
forest was torn and rent asunder by the hot bolts of truth. Mr. Lincoln
exhibited Douglas in all the attitudes he could be placed, in a friendly
debate. He exhibited the bill in all its aspects to show its humbuggery
and falsehood, and, when thus torn to rags, cut into slips, held up to
the gaze of the vast crowd, a kind of scorn and mockery was visible upon
the face of the crowd and upon the lips of their most eloquent speaker.
At the conclusion of this speech every man and child felt that it was
unanswerable. He took the heart captive and broke like a sun over the
understanding."

Anent the subject of editorial writing it may not be inappropriate to
relate that Lincoln and I both kept on furnishing political matter of
many varieties for the Springfield _Journal_ until 1860. Many of the
editorials that I wrote were intended directly or indirectly to promote
the interest of Lincoln. I wrote one on the advisability of annexing
Cuba to the United States, taking the rather advanced ground that
slavery would be abolished in Cuba before it would in this country--a
position which aroused no little controversy with other papers. One
little incident occurs to me in this connection which may not be without
interest to newspaper men. A newspaper had been started in Springfield
called the _Conservative_, which, it was believed, was being run in the
interest of the Democratic party. While pretending to support Fillmore
it was kept alive by Buchanan men and other kindred spirits, who were
somewhat pro-slavery in their views. The thing was damaging Lincoln and
the friends of freedom more than an avowed Democratic paper could. The
editor, an easy, good-natured fellow, simply placed in charge to execute
the will of those who gave the paper its financial backing, was a
good friend of mine, and by means of this friendship I was always well
informed of matters in the _Conservative_ editorial room. One day I read
in the Richmond _Enquirer_ an article endorsing slavery, and arguing
that from principle the enslavement of either whites or blacks was
justifiable and right. I showed it to Lincoln, who remarked that it was
"rather rank doctrine for Northern Democrats to endorse. I should like
to see," he said, with emphasis, "some of these Illinois newspapers
champion that." I told him if he would only wait and keep his own
counsel I would have a pro-slavery organ in Springfield publish that
very article. He doubted it, but when I told him how it was to be
done he laughed and said, "Go in." I cut the slip out and succeeded in
getting it in the paper named. Of course it was a trick, but it acted
admirably. Its appearance in the new organ, although without comment,
almost ruined that valuable journal, and my good-natured friend the
editor was nearly overcome by the denunciation of those who were
responsible for the organ's existence. My connection, and Lincoln's
too,--for he endorsed the trick,--with the publication of the condemned
article was eventually discovered, and we were thereafter effectually
prevented from getting another line in the paper. The anti-slavery
people quoted the article as having been endorsed by a Democratic
newspaper in Springfield, and Lincoln himself used it with telling
effect. He joined in the popular denunciation, expressing great
astonishment that such a sentiment could find lodgment in any paper
in Illinois, although he knew full well how the whole thing had been
carried through.

During the remainder of the State-Fair week, speeches were made by Lyman
Trumbull, Sidney Breese, E. D. Taylor, and John Calhoun, none of which
unfortunately have been preserved. Among those who mingled in the
crowd and listened to them was Owen Lovejoy, a radical, fiery, brave,
fanatical man, it may be, but one full of the virus of Abolitionism. I
had been thoroughly inoculated with the latter myself, and so had
many others, who helped to swell the throng. The Nebraska movement had
kindled anew the old zeal, and inspired us with renewed confidence
to begin the crusade. As many of us as could, assembled together to
organize for the campaign before us. As soon therefore as Lincoln
finished his speech in the hall of the House of Representatives,
Lovejoy, moving forward from the crowd, announced a meeting in the same
place that evening of all the friends of Freedom. That of course meant
the Abolitionists with whom I had been in conference all the day. Their
plan had been to induce Mr. Lincoln to speak for them at their meeting.
Strong as I was in the faith, yet I doubted the propriety of Lincoln's
taking any stand yet. As I viewed it, he was ambitious to climb to the
United States Senate, and on grounds of policy it would not do for him
to occupy at that time such advanced ground as we were taking. On the
other hand, it was equally as dangerous to refuse a speech for the
Abolitionists. I did not know how he felt on the subject, but on
learning that Lovejoy intended to approach him with an invitation,
I hunted up Lincoln and urged him to avoid meeting the enthusiastic
champion of Abolitionism. "Go home at once," I said. "Take Bob with you
and drive somewhere into the country and stay till this thing is over."
Whether my admonition and reasoning moved him or not I do not know,
but it only remains to state that under pretence of having business in
Tazewell county he drove out of town in his buggy, and did not return
till the apostles of Abolitionism had separated and gone to their
homes.* I have always believed this little arrangement--it would dignify
it too much to call it a plan--saved Lincoln. If he had endorsed the
resolutions passed at the meeting, or spoken simply in favor of freedom
that night, he would have been identified with all the rancor and
extremes of Abolitionism. If, on the contrary, he had been invited
to join them, and then had refused to take a position as advanced as
theirs, he would have lost their support. In either event he was in
great danger; and so he who was aspiring to succeed his old rival, James
Shields, in the United States Senate was forced to avoid the issue by
driving hastily in his one horse buggy to the court in Tazewell county.
A singular coincidence suggests itself in the fact that, twelve years
before, James Shields and a friend drove hastily in the same direction,
and destined for the same point, to force Lincoln to take issue in
another and entirely different matter.

     * See Lincoln's Speech, Joint Debate, Ottawa, Ills., Aug.
     20, 1858.

By request of party friends Lincoln was induced to follow after Douglas
and, at the various places where the latter had appointments to speak,
reply to him. On the 16th of October they met at Peoria, where Douglas
enjoyed the advantages of an "open and close." Lincoln made an effective
speech, which he wrote out and furnished to the Sangamon _Journal_ for
publication, and which can be found among his public utterances. His
party friends in Springfield and elsewhere, who had urged him to push
after Douglas till he cried, "enough," were surprised a few days after
the Peoria debate to find him at home, with the information that by an
agreement with the latter they were both to return home and speak no
more during the campaign. Judge of his astonishment a few days later to
find that his rival, instead of going direct to his home in Chicago,
had stopped at Princeton and violated his express agreement by making
a speech there! Lincoln was much displeased at this action of Douglas,
which tended to convince him that the latter was really a man devoid of
fixed political morals. I remember his explanation in our office made to
me, William Butler, William Jayne, Ben. F. Irwin, and other friends, to
account for his early withdrawal from the stump. After the Peoria debate
Douglas approached him and flattered him by saying that he was giving
him more trouble on the territorial and slavery questions than all the
United States Senate, and he therefore proposed to him that both should
abandon the field and return to their homes. Now Lincoln could never
refuse a polite request--one in which no principle was involved. I have
heard him say, "It's a fortunate thing I wasn't born a woman, for
I cannot refuse anything, it seems." He therefore consented to the
cessation of debate proposed by Douglas, and the next day both went
to the town of Lacon, where they had been billed for speeches.
Their agreement was kept from their friends, and both declined to
speak--Douglas, on the ground of hoarseness, and Lincoln gallantly
refusing to take advantage of "Judge Douglas's indisposition." Here they
separated, Lincoln going directly home, and Douglas, as before related,
stopping at Princeton and colliding in debate with Owen Lovejoy. Upon
being charged afterwards with his breach of agreement Douglas responded
that Lovejoy "bantered and badgered" him so persistently he could not
gracefully resist the encounter. The whole thing thoroughly displeased
Lincoln.*

     * In a letter from Princeton, Ill., March 15, 1866, John H.
     Bryant, brother of the poet William Cullen Bryant, writes:
     "I have succeeded in finding an old file of our Princeton
     papers, from which I learn that Mr. Douglas spoke here on
     Wednesday, Oct. 18, 1854. This fixes the date. I recollect
     that he staid at Tiskilwa, six miles south of this, the
     night before, and a number of our Democrats went down the
     next morning and escorted him to this place. Douglas spoke
     first one half-hour and was answered by Lovejoy one half-
     hour, when Douglas talked till dark, giving no opportunity
     for reply.

     "Yours truly,

     "John H. Bryant."

During this campaign Lincoln was nominated and elected to the
Legislature. This was done in the face of his unwillingness and over his
protest. On the ticket with him was Judge Logan. Both were elected by
a majority of about 600 votes. Lincoln, being ambitious to reach the
United States Senate, and warmly encouraged in his aspirations by his
wife, resigned his seat in the Legislature in order that he might the
more easily be elected to succeed his old rival James Shields, who was
then one of the senators from Illinois. His canvass for that exalted
office was marked by his characteristic activity and vigilance. During
the anxious moments that intervened between the general election and
the assembling of the Legislature he slept, like Napoleon, with one eye
open. While attending court at Clinton on the 11th of November, a few
days after the election, he wrote to a party friend in the town
of Paris: "I have a suspicion that a Whig has been elected to the
Legislature from Edgar. If this is not so, why then, '_nix cum arous_;
but if it is so, then could you not make a mark with him for me for U.
S. Senator? I really have some chance. Please write me at Springfield
giving me the names, post-offices, and political positions of
your Representative and Senator, whoever they may be. Let this be
confidential.'"

That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about
him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge
of Lincoln. He was always calculating, and always planning ahead. His
ambition was a little engine that knew no rest. The vicissitudes of a
political campaign brought into play all his tact and management and
developed to its fullest extent his latent industry. In common with
other politicians he never overlooked a newspaper man who had it in his
power to say a good or bad thing of him. The press of that day was not
so powerful an institution as now, but ambitious politicians courted the
favor of a newspaper man with as much zeal as the same class of men have
done in later days. I remember a letter Lincoln once wrote to the editor
of an obscure little country newspaper in southern Illinois in which he
warms up to him in the following style.* "Friend Harding: I have been
reading your paper for three or four years and have paid you nothing
for it." He then encloses ten dollars and admonishes the editor with
innocent complacency: "Put it into your pocket, saying nothing further
about it." Very soon thereafter, he prepared an article on political
matters and sent it to the rural journalist, requesting its publication
in the editorial columns of his "valued paper," but the latter, having
followed Lincoln's directions and stowed the ten dollars away in
his pocket, and alive to the importance of his journal's influence,
declined, "because," he said, "I long ago made it a rule to publish
nothing as editorial matter not written by myself." Lincoln read the
editor's answer to me. Although the laugh was on Lincoln he enjoyed the
joke heartily. "That editor," he said, "has a rather lofty but proper
conception of true journalism."

Meanwhile the Legislature had convened and the Senatorial question came
on for solution. The history of this contest is generally understood,
and the world has repeatedly been told how Lincoln was led to expect the
place and would have won but for the apostasy of the five anti-Nebraska
men of Democratic antecedents who clung to and finally forced the
election of Lyman Trumbull. The student of history in after years will
be taught to revere the name of Lincoln for his exceeding magnanimity
in inducing his friends to abandon him at the critical period and save
Trumbull, while he himself disappeared beneath the waves of defeat.*

     * "After a number of ballots--Judd of Cook, Cook of La
     Salle, Palmer of Macoupin, and Allen and Baker of Madison
     voting for Trumbull--I asked Mr. Lincoln what he would
     advise us to do. He answered, 'Go for Trumbull by all
     means.' We understood the case to be that Shields was to be
     run by the Democrats at first and then to be dropped, and
     Joel A. Matteson put up; and it was calculated that certain
     of our men who had been elected on the 'Free Soil' issue
     would vote for him after they had acted with us long enough
     to satisfy their consciences and constituents. Our object
     was to force an election before they got through with their
     programme. We were savagely opposed to Matteson, and so was
     Mr. Lincoln, who said that if we did not drop in and unite
     upon Trumbull the five men above-named would go for Matteson
     and elect him, which would be an everlasting disgrace to the
     State. We reluctantly complied; went to Trumbull and elected
     him. I remember that Judge S. T. Logan gave up Lincoln with
     great reluctance. He begged hard to try him on one or two
     ballots more, but Mr. Lincoln urged us not to risk it
     longer. I never saw the latter more earnest and decided. He
     congratulated Trumbull warmly, although of course greatly
     disappointed and mortified at his own want of success."--
     Joseph Gillespie, letter, September 19, 1866, MS.

[Illustration: Lyman Trumbull 066]

This frustration of Lincoln's ambition had a marked effect on his
political views. It was plain to him now that the "irrepressible
conflict" was not far ahead. With the strengthening of his faith in a
just cause so long held in abeyance he became more defiant each day. But
in the very nature of things he dared not be as bold and outspoken as
I. With him every word and sentence had to be weighed and its effects
calculated, before being uttered: but with me that operation had to be
reversed if done at all. An incident that occurred about this time will
show how his views were broadening. Some time after the election of
Trumbull a young negro, the son of a colored woman in Springfield known
as Polly, went from his home to St. Louis and there hired as a hand on
a lower Mississippi boat,--for what special service, I do not
recollect,--arriving in New Orleans without what were known as free
papers. Though born free he was subjected to the tyranny of the "black
code," all the more stringent because of the recent utterances of the
Abolitionists in the North, and was kept in prison until his boat
had left. Then, as no one was especially interested in him, he was
forgotten. After a certain length of time established by law, he would
inevitably have been sold into slavery to defray prison expenses had not
Lincoln and I interposed our aid. The mother came to us with the story
of the wrong done her son and induced us to interfere in her behalf.
We went first to see the Governor of Illinois, who, after patient and
thorough examination of the law, responded that he had no right or power
to interfere. Recourse was then had to the Governor of Louisiana, who
responded in like manner. We were sorely perplexed. A second interview
with the Governor of Illinois resulting in nothing favorable Lincoln
rose from his chair, hat in hand, and exclaimed with some emphasis: "By
God, Governor, I'll make the ground in this country too hot for the foot
of a slave, whether you have the legal power to secure the release of
this boy or not." Having exhausted all legal means to recover the
negro we dropped our relation as lawyers to the case. Lincoln drew up
a subscription-list, which I circulated, collecting funds enough to
purchase the young man's liberty. The money we sent to Col. A. P.
Fields, a friend of ours in New Orleans, who applied it as directed, and
it restored the prisoner to his overjoyed mother.

The political history of the country, commencing in 1854 and continuing
till the outbreak of the Rebellion, furnishes the student a constant
succession of stirring and sometimes bloody scenes. No sooner had
Lincoln emerged from the Senatorial contest in February, 1855, and
absorbed himself in the law, than the outrages on the borders of
Missouri and Kansas began to arrest public attention. The stories of
raids, election frauds, murders, and other crimes were moving eastward
with marked rapidity. These outbursts of frontier lawlessness, led and
sanctioned by the avowed pro-slavery element, were not only stirring up
the Abolitionists to fever heat, but touching the hearts of humanity
in general. In Illinois an association was formed to aid the cause
of "Free-Soil" men in Kansas. In the meetings of these bands the
Abolitionists of course took the most prominent part. At Springfield
we were energetic, vigilant, almost revolutionary. We recommended the
employment of any means, however desperate, to promote and defend the
cause of freedom. At one of these meetings Lincoln was called on for
a speech. He responded to the request, counselling moderation and less
bitterness in dealing with the situation before us. We were belligerent
in tone, and clearly out of patience with the Government. Lincoln
opposed the notion of coercive measures with the possibility of
resulting bloodshed, advising us to eschew resort to the bullet. "You
can better succeed," he declared, "with the ballot. You can peaceably
then redeem the Government and preserve the liberties of mankind
through your votes and voice and moral influence.... Let there be peace.
Revolutionize through the ballot box, and restore the Government once
more to the affections and hearts of men by making it express, as it was
intended to do, the highest spirit of justice and liberty. Your attempt,
if there be such, to resist the laws of Kansas by force is criminal and
wicked; and all your feeble attempts will be follies and end in
bringing sorrow on your heads and ruin the cause you would freely die to
preserve!" These judicious words of counsel, while they reduced somewhat
our ardor and our desperation, only placed before us in their real
colors the grave features of the situation. We raised a neat sum of
money, Lincoln showing his sincerity by joining in the subscription, and
forwarded it to our friends in Kansas.

The Whig party, having accomplished its mission in the political world,
was now on the eve of a great break-up. Lincoln realized this and,
though proverbially slow in his movements, prepared to find a firm
footing when the great rush of waters should come and the maddening
freshet sweep former landmarks out of sight. Of the strongest
significance in this connection is a letter written by him at this
juncture to an old friend in Kentucky, who called to his attention
their differences of views on the wrong of slavery. Speaking of his
observation of the treatment of the slaves, he says: "I confess I hate
to see the poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried back to
their unrequited toils; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841 you
and I had rather a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from Louisville
to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville
to the mouth of the Ohio, there were on board ten or a dozen slaves
shackled together with irons. That sight was a continued torment to me;
and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any slave
border. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in
a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me
miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of
the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their
loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. I do oppose the extension of
slavery because my judgment and feeling so prompt me; and I am under no
obligations to the contrary. If for this you and I must differ, differ
we must."

Finding himself drifting about with the disorganized elements that
floated together after the angry political waters had subsided, it
became apparent to Lincoln that if he expected to figure as a leader he
must take a stand himself. Mere hatred of slavery and opposition to
the injustice of the Kansas-Nebraska legislation were not all that were
required of him. He must be a Democrat, Know-Nothing, Abolitionist, or
Republican, or forever float about in the great political sea without
compass, rudder, or sail. At length he declared himself. Believing the
times were ripe for more advanced movements, in the spring of 1856 I
drew up a paper for the friends of freedom to sign, calling a county
convention in Springfield to select delegates for the forthcoming
Republican State convention in Bloomington. The paper was freely
circulated and generously signed. Lincoln was absent at the time and,
believing I knew what his "feeling and judgment" on the vital questions
of the hour were, I took the liberty to sign his name to the call. The
whole was then published in the Springfield _Journal_. No sooner had
it appeared than John T. Stuart, who, with others, was endeavoring to
retard Lincoln in his advanced movements, rushed into the office and
excitedly asked if "Lincoln had signed that Abolition call in the
Journal?" I answered in the negative, adding that I had signed his
name myself. To the question, "Did Lincoln authorize you to sign it?" I
returned an emphatic "No." "Then," exclaimed the startled and indignant
Stuart, "you have ruined him." But I was by no means alarmed at what
others deemed inconsiderate and hasty action. I thought I understood
Lincoln thoroughly, but in order to vindicate myself if assailed I
immediately sat down, after Stuart had rushed out of the office, and
wrote Lincoln, who was then in Tazewell County attending court, a brief
account of what I had done and how much stir it was creating in the
ranks of his conservative friends. If he approved or disapproved my
course I asked him to write or telegraph me at once. In a brief time
came his answer: "All right; go ahead. Will meet you--radicals and
all." Stuart subsided, and the conservative spirits who hovered around
Springfield no longer held control of the political fortunes of Abraham
Lincoln.

The Republican party came into existence in Illinois as a party at
Bloomington, May 29, 1856. The State convention of all opponents of
anti-Nebraska legislation, referred to in a foregoing paragraph, had
been set for that day. Judd, Yates, Trumbull, Swett, and Davis were
there; so also was Lovejoy, who, like Otis of colonial fame, was a flame
of fire. The firm of Lincoln and Herndon was represented by both members
in person. The gallant William H. Bissell, who had ridden at the head of
the Second Illinois Regiment at the battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican
war, was nominated as governor. The convention adopted a platform
ringing with strong anti-Nebraska sentiments, and then and there gave
the Republican party its official christening. The business of the
convention being over, Mr. Lincoln, in response to repeated calls, came
forward and delivered a speech of such earnestness and power that no one
who heard it will ever forget the effect it produced. In referring to
this speech some years ago I used the following rather graphic language:
"I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln's great speeches, and I give
it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his
life. Heretofore he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds
of policy,--the statesman's grounds,--never reaching the question of
the radical and the eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly
born; he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke
out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an
inspiration; he felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his
sympathies, remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before
the throne of the eternal Right. His speech was full of fire and energy
and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was
justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a
soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed
with wrath. I attempted for about fifteen minutes as was usual with me
then to take notes, but at the end of that time I threw pen and paper
away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour. If Mr. Lincoln was
six feet, four inches high usually, at Bloomington that day he was seven
feet, and inspired at that. From that day to the day of his death he
stood firm in the right. He felt his great cross, had his great idea,
nursed it, kept it, taught it to others, in his fidelity bore witness
of it to his death, and finally sealed it with his precious blood." The
foregoing paragraph, used by me in a lecture in 1866, may to the
average reader seem somewhat vivid in description, besides inclining to
extravagance in imagery, yet although more than twenty years have passed
since it was written I have never seen the need of altering a single
sentence. I still adhere to the substantial truthfulness of the scene
as described. Unfortunately Lincoln's speech was never written out nor
printed, and we are obliged to depend for its reproduction upon personal
recollection.

The Bloomington convention and the part Lincoln took in it met no such
hearty response in Springfield as we hoped would follow. It fell flat,
and in Lincoln's case drove from him many persons who had heretofore
been his warm political friends. A few days after our return we
announced a meeting at the court-house to ratify the action of the
Bloomington convention. After the usual efforts to draw a crowd,
however, only three persons had temerity enough to attend. They were
Lincoln, the writer, and a courageous man named John Pain. Lincoln, in
answer to the "deafening calls" for a speech, responded that the meeting
was larger than he _knew_ it would be, and that while he knew that he
himself and his partner would attend he was not sure anyone else would,
and yet another man had been found brave enough to come out. "While all
seems dead," he exhorted, "the age itself is not. It liveth as sure as
our Maker liveth. Under all this seeming want of life and motion, the
world does move nevertheless. Be hopeful, and now let us adjourn and
appeal to the people."

Not only in Springfield but everywhere else the founders of the
Republican party--the apostles of freedom--went out to battle for the
righteousness of their cause. Lincoln, having as usual been named as one
of the Presidential electors, canvassed the State, making in all about
fifty speeches. He was in demand everywhere. I have before me a package
of letters addressed to him, inviting him to speak at almost every
county seat in the State. Yates wanted him to go to one section of the
State, Washburne to another, and Trumbull still another; while every
cross-roads politician and legislative aspirant wanted him "down in our
country, where we need your help." Joshua R. Giddings wrote him words of
encouragement. "You may start," said the valiant old Abolitionist in
a letter from Peoria,* "on the one great issue of restoring Kansas and
Nebraska to freedom, or rather of restoring the Missouri Compromise, and
in this State no power on earth can withstand you on that issue." The
demand for Lincoln was not confined to his own State. Indiana sent for
him, Wisconsin also, while Norman B. Judd and Ebenezer Peck, who were
stumping Iowa, sent for him to come there.

     * J. R. Giddings, MS. letter, Sept. 18, 1855.

A town committee invited him to come during "our Equestrian Fair on the
9th, 10th, and 11th," evidently anticipating a three days' siege. An
enthusiastic officer in a neighboring town urges him: "Come to our
place, because in you do our people place more confidence than in any
other man. Men who do not read want the story told as you only can tell
it. Others may make fine speeches, but it would not be 'Lincoln said
so in his speech.'" A jubilant friend in Chicago writes: "Push on the
column of freedom. Give the Buck Africans plenty to do in Egypt. The
hour of our redemption draweth nigh. We are coming to Springfield
with 20,000 majority!" A postmaster, acting under the courage of his
convictions, implores him to visit his neighborhood. "The Democrats
here," he insists, "are dyed in the wool. Thunder and lightning would
not change their political complexion. I am postmaster here," he adds,
confidentially, "for which reason I must ask you to keep this private,
for if old Frank [President Pierce] were to hear of my support of
Fremont I would get my walking papers sure enough." A settlement of
Germans in southern Indiana asked to hear him; and the president of
a college, in an invitation to address the students under his charge,
characterizes him as "one providentially raised up for a time like this,
and even should defeat come in the contest, it would be some consolation
to remember we had Hector for a leader."

And thus it was everywhere. Lincoln's importance in the conduct of the
campaign was apparent to all, and his canvass was characterized by his
usual vigor and effectiveness. He was especially noted for his attempt
to break down the strength of Fillmore, who was nominated as a third
party candidate and was expected to divide the Republican vote. He tried
to wean away Fillmore's adherents by an adroit and ingenious
letter* sent to those suspected of the latter's support, and marked
confidential, in which he strove to show that in clinging to their
candidate they were really aiding the election of Buchanan. But the
effort proved unavailing, for in spite of all his arguments and appeals
a large number of the Fillmore men clung tenaciously to their leader,
resulting in Buchanan's election. The vote in Illinois stood, Buchanan
105,344, Fremont 96,180, and Fillmore 37,451. At the same time Bissell
was elected governor by a majority of 4729 over W. A. Richardson,
Democrat. After the heat and burden of the day Lincoln returned home,
bearing with him more and greater laurels than ever. The signs of the
times indicated, and the result of the canvass demonstrated, that he and
he alone was powerful enough to meet the redoubtable Little Giant in a
greater conflict yet to follow.

     * One of these letters which Lincoln wrote to counteract the
     Fillmore movement is still in my possession. As it is more
     or less characteristic I copy it entire:

     "Springfield, September 8,1856.

     "Harrison Maltby, Esq.

     "Dear Sir:

     "I understand you are a Fillmore man. Let me prove to you
     that every vote withheld from Fremont and given to Fillmore
     in this State actually lessens Fillmore's chance of being
     President.

     "Suppose Buchanan gets all the slave States and Pennsylvania
     and any other one State besides; then he is elected, no
     matter who gets all the rest. But suppose Fillmore gets the
     two slave States of Maryland and Kentucky, then Buchanan is
     not elected; Fillmore goes into the House of Representatives
     and may be made President by a compromise. But suppose again
     Fillmore's friends throw away a few thousand votes on him in
     Indiana and Illinois; it will inevitably give these States
     to Buchanan, which will more than compensate him for the
     loss of Maryland and Kentucky; it will elect him, and leave
     Fillmore no chance in the House of Representatives or out of
     it.

     "This is as plain as adding up the weight of three small
     hogs. As Mr. Fillmore has no possible chance to carry
     Illinois for himself it is plainly to his interest to let
     Fremont take it and thus keep it out of the hands of
     Buchanan. Be not deceived. Buchanan is the hard horse to
     beat in this race. Let him have Illinois, and nothing can
     beat him; and he will get Illinois if men persist in
     throwing away votes upon Mr. Fillmore. Does some one
     persuade you that Mr. Fillmore can carry Illinois? Nonsense!
     There are over seventy newspapers in Illinois opposing
     Buchanan, only three or four of which support Mr. Fillmore,
     all the rest going for Fremont. Are not these newspapers a
     fair index of the proportion of the votes? If not, tell me
     why.

     "Again, of these three or four Fillmore newspapers, two at
     least are supported in part by the Buchanan men, as I
     understand. Do not they know where the shoe pinches? They
     know the Fillmore movement helps them, and therefore they
     help it.

     "Do think these things over and then act according to your
     judgment.

     "Yours very truly,

     "A. LINCOLN." [Confidential.]




CHAPTER III.

I SHALL be forced to omit much that happened during the interval between
the election of Buchanan and the campaign of 1858, for the reason that
it would not only swell this work to undue proportions, but be a mere
repetition of what has been better told by other writers. It is
proper to note in passing, however, that Mr. Lincoln's reputation as a
political speaker was no longer bounded by the border lines of Illinois.
It had passed beyond the Wabash, the Ohio, and the Mississippi rivers,
and while his pronounced stand on the slavery question had increased the
circle of his admirers in the North it provoked a proportionate amount
of execration in the South. He could not help the feeling that he was
now the leading Republican in his State, and he was therefore more or
less jealous of his prerogative. Formidable in debate, plain in
speech, without pretence of literary acquirements, he was none the less
self-reliant. He already envied the ascendancy and domination Douglas
exercised over his followers, and felt keenly the slight given him by
others of his own faith whom he conceived were disposed to prevent his
attaining the leadership of his party. I remember early in 1858 of his
coming into the office one morning and speaking in very dejected terms
of the treatment he was receiving at the hands of Horace Greeley. "I
think Greeley," he complained, "is not doing me right. His conduct, I
believe, savors a little of injustice. I am a true Republican and have
been tried already in the hottest part of the anti-slavery fight, and
yet I find him taking up Douglas, a veritable dodger,--once a tool of
the South, now its enemy,--and pushing him to the front. He forgets that
when he does that he pulls me down at the same time. I fear Greeley's
attitude will damage me with Sumner, Seward, Wilson, Phillips, and other
friends in the East." This was said with so much of mingled sadness and
earnestness that I was deeply impressed. Lincoln was gloomy and restless
the entire day. Greeley's letters were driving the enthusiasm out of
him.*

     * Greeley's letters were very pointed and sometimes savage.
     Here is one; "I have not proposed to instruct the
     Republicans of Illinois in their political duties, and I
     doubt very much that even so much as is implied in your
     letter can be fairly deduced from anything I have written.
     Now let me make one prediction. If you run a candidate [for
     Congress] against Harris and he is able to canvass he will
     beat you badly. He is more of a man at heart and morally
     than Douglas, and has gone into this fight with more
     earnestness and less calculation. Of the whole Douglas party
     he is the truest and best. I never spoke a dozen words with
     him in my life, having met him but once, but if I lived in
     his district I should vote for him. As I have never spoken
     of him in my paper, and suppose I never shall, I take the
     liberty to say this much to you. Now paddle your own dug-
     out!

     "Yours,

     "Horace Greeley."

He seemed unwilling to attend to any business, and finally, just before
noon, left the office, going over to the United States Court room to
play a game of chess with Judge Treat, and did not return again that
day. I pondered a good deal over Lincoln's dejection, and that night,
after weighing the matter well in mind, resolved to go to the eastern
States myself and endeavor to sound some of the great men there. The
next day, on apprising Lincoln of my determination, he questioned its
propriety. Our relations, he insisted, were so intimate that a wrong
construction might be put upon the movement. I listened carefully to
him, but as I had never been beyond the Alleghanies I packed my valise
and went, notwithstanding his objections. I had been in correspondence
on my own account with Greeley, Seward, Sumner, Phillips, and others for
several years, had kept them informed of the feelings of our people and
the political campaigns in their various stages, but had never met any
of them save Greeley. I enjoyed heartily the journey and the varied
sights and scenes that attended it. Aside from my mission, the trip was
a great success. The magnificent buildings, the display of wealth in the
large cities and prosperous manufacturing towns, broadened the views of
one whose vision had never extended beyond the limits of the Illinois
prairies. In Washington I saw and dined with Trumbull, who went over the
situation with me. Trumbull had written to Lincoln shortly before* that
he thought it "useless to speculate upon the further course of Douglas
or the effect it is to have in Illinois or other States. He himself does
not know where he is going or where he will come out."

     * Letter, December 25, 1857, MS.

At my interview with Trumbull, however, he directed me to assure Mr.
Lincoln that Douglas did not mean to join the Republican party, however
great the breach between himself and the administration might be. "We
Republicans here," he said exultingly in another letter to Lincoln, "are
in good spirits, and are standing back to let the fight go on between
Douglas and his former associates. Lincoln will lose nothing by this
if he can keep the attention of our Illinois people from being diverted
from the great and vital question of the day to the minor and temporary
issues which are now being discussed."*

     * Letter, December 27,1857, MS.

In Washington I saw also Seward, Wilson, and others of equal prominence.
Douglas was confined to his house by illness, but on receiving my
card he directed me to be shown up to his room. We had a pleasant
and interesting interview. Of course the conversation soon turned on
Lincoln. In answer to an inquiry regarding the latter I remarked that
Lincoln was pursuing the even tenor of his way. "He is not in anybody's
way," I contended, "not even in yours, Judge Douglas." He was sitting up
in a chair smoking a cigar. Between puffs he responded that neither was
he in the way of Lincoln or any one else, and did not intend to invite
conflict. He conceived that he had achieved what he had set out to do,
and hence did not feel that his course need put him in opposition to
Mr. Lincoln or his party. "Give Mr. Lincoln my regards," he said, rather
warmly, "when you return, and tell him I have crossed the river and
burned my boat." Leaving Washington, my next point was New York, where
I met the editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, Horace Greeley,
Henry Ward Beecher, and others. I had a long talk with Greeley, who,
I noticed, leaned towards Douglas. I found, however, he was not at all
hostile to Lincoln.

I presented the latter's case in the best phase I knew how, but while
I drew but little from him, I left feeling that he hadn't been entirely
won over. He introduced me to Beecher, who, as everybody else did,
inquired after Lincoln and through me sent him words of encouragement
and praise.*

     * Lincoln's greatest fear was that Douglas might be taken up
     by the Republicans. Senator Seward, when I met him in
     Washington, assured me there was no danger of it, insisting
     that the Republicans nor any one else could place any
     reliance on a man so slippery as Douglas.

From New York I went to Boston, and from the latter place I wrote
Lincoln a letter which happily I found not long since in a bundle of
Lincoln's letters, and which I insert here, believing it affords a
better reflex of the situation at the time than anything I might see fit
to say now. Here it is:

"Revere House,

"Boston, Mass., March 24, 1858.

"Friend Lincoln.

"I am in this city of notions, and am well--very well indeed. I wrote
you a hasty letter from Washington some days ago, since which time I
have been in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and now here. I saw
Greeley, and so far as any of our conversation is interesting to you
I will relate. And we talked, say twenty minutes. He evidently wants
Douglas sustained and sent back to the Senate. He did not say so in so
many words, yet his feelings are with Douglas. I know it from the spirit
and drift of his conversation. He talked bitterly--somewhat so--against
the papers in Illinois, and said they were fools. I asked him this
question, 'Greeley, do you want to see a third party organized, or do
you want Douglas to ride to power through the North, which he has so
much abused and betrayed? and to which he replied, 'Let the future
alone; it will all come right. Douglas is a brave man. Forget the past
and sustain the _righteous_' Good God, _righteous_, eh!

"Since I have landed in Boston I have seen much that was entertaining
and interesting. This morning I was introduced to Governor Banks. He and
I had a conversation about Republicanism and especially about Douglas.
He asked me this question, 'You will sustain Douglas in Illinois, wont
you?' and to which I said 'No, never!' He affected to be much
surprised, and so the matter dropped and turned on Republicanism, or in
general--Lincoln. Greeley's and other sheets that laud Douglas, Harris,
et al., want them sustained, and will try to do it. Several persons have
asked me the same question which Banks asked, and evidently they get
their cue, ideas, or what not from Greeley, Seward, et al. By-the-bye,
Greeley remarked to me this, 'The Republican standard is too high; we
want something practical.'

"This may not be interesting to you, but, however it may be, it is my
duty to state what is going on, so that you may head it off--counteract
it in some way. I hope it can be done. The Northern men are cold to
me--somewhat repellent.

"Your friend,

"W. H. Herndon."

On my return home I had encouraging news to relate. I told Lincoln of
the favorable mention I had heard of him by Phillips, Sumner, Seward,
Garrison, Beecher, and Greeley. I brought with me additional sermons
and lectures by Theodore Parker, who was warm in his commendation of
Lincoln. One of these was a lecture on "The Effect of Slavery on the
American People," which was delivered in the Music Hall in Boston, and
which I gave to Lincoln, who read and returned it. He liked especially
the following expression, which he marked with a pencil, and which he
in substance afterwards used in his Gettysburg address: "Democracy is
direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all
the people."

Meanwhile, passing by other events which have become interwoven in the
history of the land, we reach April, 1858, at which time the Democratic
State convention met and, besides nominating candidates for State
offices, endorsed Mr. Douglas' services in the Senate, thereby virtually
renominating him for that exalted office. In the very nature of things
Lincoln was the man already chosen in the hearts of the Republicans
of Illinois for the same office, and therefore with singular
appropriateness they passed, with great unanimity, at their convention
in Springfield on the 16th of June, the characteristic resolution: "That
Hon. Abraham Lincoln is our first and only choice for United States
Senator to fill the vacancy about to be created by the expiration of Mr.
Douglas' term of office." There was of course no surprise in this for
Mr. Lincoln. He had been all along led to expect it, and with that
in view had been earnestly and quietly at work preparing a speech in
acknowledgment of the honor about to be conferred on him. This speech
he wrote on stray envelopes and scraps of paper, as ideas suggested
themselves, putting them into that miscellaneous and convenient
receptacle, his hat. As the convention drew near he copied the whole
on connected sheets, carefully revising every line and sentence, and
fastened them together, for reference during the delivery of the speech,
and for publication. The former precaution, however, was unnecessary,
for he had studied and read over what he had written so long and
carefully that he was able to deliver it without the least hesitation or
difficulty. A few days before the convention, when he was at work on the
speech, I remember that Jesse K. Dubois,* who was Auditor of State, came
into the office and, seeing Lincoln busily writing, inquired what he was
doing or what he was writing.

     * "After the convention Lincoln met me on the street and
     said, 'Dubois, I can tell you now what I was doing the other
     day when you came into my office. I was writing that speech,
     and I knew if I read the passage about the "house divided
     against itself" to you, you would ask me to change or modify
     it, and that I was determined not to do. I had willed it so,
     and was willing if necessary to perish with it."--Statement
     of Jesse K. Dubois, MS.

Lincoln answered gruffly, "It's something you may see or hear some time,
but I'll not let you see it now." I myself knew what he was writing,
but having asked neither my opinion nor that of anyone else, I did not
venture to offer any suggestions. After he had finished the final draft
of the speech, he locked the office door, drew the curtain across the
glass panel in the door, and read it to me. At the end of each paragraph
he would halt and wait for my comments. I remember what I said after
hearing the first paragraph, wherein occurs the celebrated figure of the
house divided against itself: "It is true, but is it wise or politic
to say so?" He responded: "That expression is a truth of all human
experience, 'a house divided against itself cannot stand,' and 'he
that runs may read.' The proposition also is true, and has been for six
thousand years. I want to use some universally known figure expressed in
simple language as universally well-known, that may strike home to the
minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times. I do
not believe I would be right in changing or omitting it. I would rather
be defeated with this expression in the speech, and uphold and discuss
it before the people, than be victorious without it." This was not the
first time Lincoln had endorsed the dogma that our Government could not
long endure part slave and part free. He had incorporated it in a speech
at Bloomington in 1856, but in obedience to the emphatic protest
of Judge T. Lyle Dickey and others, who conceived the idea that
its "delivery would make Abolitionists of all the North and slavery
propagandists of all the South, and thereby precipitate a struggle which
might end in disunion," he consented to suspend its repetition,
but only for that campaign.* Now, however, the situation had changed
somewhat. There had been a shifting of scenes, so to speak. The
Republican party had gained some in strength and more in moral
effectiveness and force. Nothing could keep back in Lincoln any longer,
sentiments of right and truth, and he prepared to give the fullest
expression to both in all future contests.

     * "After the meeting was over Mr. Lincoln and I returned to
     the Pike House, where we occupied the same room. Immediately
     on reaching the room I said to him, 'What in God's name
     could induce you to promulgate such an opinion?' He replied
     familiarly, 'Upon my soul, Dickey, I think it is true.' I
     reasoned to show it was not a correct opinion. He argued
     strenuously that the opinion was a sound one. At length I
     said, 'Suppose you are right, that our Government cannot
     last part free and part slave, what good is to be
     accomplished by inculcating that opinion (or truth, if you
     please) in the minds of the people?' After some minutes
     reflection he rose and approached me, extending his right
     hand to take mine, and said, 'From respect for your
     judgment, Dickey, I'll promise you I won't teach the
     doctrine again during this campaign.'"--Letter, T. Lyle
     Dickey, MS., December 8, 1866.

[Illustration: Hall of Representatives, State House, Springfield  090]

Before delivering his speech he invited a dozen or so of his friends
over to the library of the State House, where he read and submitted
it to them. After the reading he asked each man for his opinion. Some
condemned and not one endorsed it. One man, more forcible than elegant,
characterized it as a "d------d fool utterance", another said the doctrine
was "ahead of its time" and still another contended that it would drive
away a good many voters fresh from the Democratic ranks. Each man
attacked it in his criticism. I was the last to respond. Although the
doctrine announced was rather rank, yet it suited my views, and I said,
"Lincoln, deliver that speech as read and it will make you President."
At the time I hardly realized the force of my prophecy. Having patiently
listened to these various criticisms from his friends--all of which
with a single exception were adverse--he rose from his chair, and after
alluding to the careful study and intense thought he had given the
question, he answered all their objections substantially as follows:
"Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough. The time has come
when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I
should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the
truth--let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." The next
day, the 17th, the speech was delivered just as we had heard it read.
Up to this time Seward had held sway over the North by his "higher-law"
sentiments, but the "house-divided-against-itself" speech by Lincoln in
my opinion drove the nail into Seward's political coffin.*

     * If any student of oratorical history, after reading
     Lincoln's speech on this occasion, will refer to Webster's
     reply to Hayne in the Senate, he will be struck with the
     similarity in figure and thought in the opening lines of
     both speeches. In fact, it may not be amiss to note that, in
     this instance, Webster's effort was carefully read by
     Lincoln and served in part as his model.

Lincoln had now created in reality a more profound impression than he or
his friends anticipated. Many Republicans deprecated the advanced ground
he had taken, the more so as the Democrats rejoiced that it afforded
them an issue clear and well-defined. Numbers of his friends distant
from Springfield, on reading his speech, wrote him censorious letters;
and one well-informed co-worker* predicted his defeat, charging it to
the first ten lines of the speech.

     * Leonard Swett.

These complaints, coming apparently from every quarter, Lincoln bore
with great patience. To one complainant who followed him into his office
he said proudly, "If I had to draw a pen across my record, and erase my
whole life from sight, and I had one poor gift or choice left as to what
I should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it
to the world unerased." Meanwhile Douglas had returned from Washington
to his home in Chicago. Here he rested for a few days until his friends
and co-workers had arranged the details of a public reception on the
9th of July, when he delivered from the balcony of the Tremont House a
speech intended as an answer to the one made by Lincoln in Springfield.
Lincoln was present at this reception, but took no part in it. The
next day, however, he replied. Both speeches were delivered at the
same place. Leaving Chicago, Douglas passed on down to Bloomington and
Springfield, where he spoke on the 16th and 17th of July respectively.
On the evening of the latter day Lincoln responded again in a most
effective and convincing effort. The contest now took on a different
phase. Lincoln's Republican friends urged him to draw Douglas into a
joint debate, and he accordingly sent him a challenge on the 24th
of July. It is not necessary, I suppose, to reproduce here the
correspondence that passed between these great leaders. On the 30th
Douglas finally accepted the proposition to "divide time, and address
the same audiences," naming seven different places, one in each
Congressional district, outside of Chicago and Springfield, for joint
meetings.*

     * Among the items of preparation on Lincoln's part hitherto
     withheld is the following letter, which explains itself:

[Illustration:  Letter to Campbell 095]

     "Springfield, June 28, 1858.

     "A. Campbell, Esq.

     "My Dear Sir:--In 1856 you gave me authority to draw on you
     for any sum not exceeding five hundred dollars. I see
     clearly that such a privilege would be more available now
     than it was then. I am aware that times are tighter now than
     they were then. Please write me at all events, and whether
     you can now do anything or not I shall continue grateful for
     the past.

     "Yours very truly,

     "A. Lincoln."

     * The following recent letter from Mr. Campbell is not
     without interest:

     La Salle, Ill., Dec. 12th, 1888.

     "Jesse W. Weik, Esq.

     "My Dear Sir:--I gave Mr. Lincoln some money in the office
     of Lincoln & Herndon in Springfield in 1856, but I do not
     remember the exact amount. It was, however, between two and
     three hundred dollars. I never had Mr. Lincoln's obligation
     for the payment of any money. I never kept any account of
     nor charged my memory with any money I gave him. It was
     given to defray his personal expenses and otherwise promote
     the interest of a cause which I sincerely believed to be for
     the public good, and without the thought or expectation of a
     dollar of it ever being returned. From what I knew and
     learned of his careful habits in money matters in the
     campaign of 1856 I am entirely confident that every dollar
     and dime I ever gave was carefully and faithfully applied to
     the uses and purposes for which it was given.

     "Sincerely yours,

     "A. Campbell."

The places and dates were, Ottawa, August 21; Freeport, August 27;
Jonesboro, September 15; Charleston, September 18; Galesburg, October 7;
Quincy, October 13; and Alton, October 15. "I agree to your suggestion,"
wrote Douglas, "that we shall alternately open and close the discussion.
I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply, occupying an hour and
a half, and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport you shall
open the discussion and speak one hour, I will follow for an hour and a
half, and you can then reply for half an hour. We will alternate in like
manner in each successive place." To this arrangement Lincoln on the
31st gave his consent, "although," he wrote, "by the terms as you
propose you take four openings and closes to my three."

History furnishes few characters whose lives and careers were so nearly
parallel as those of Lincoln and Douglas. They met for the first time at
the Legislature in Vandalia in 1834, where Lincoln was a member of the
House of Representatives and Douglas was in the lobby. The next year
Douglas was also a member. In 1839 both were admitted to practice in
the Supreme Court of Illinois on the same day.* In 1841 both courted
the same young lady. In 1846 both represented Illinois in Congress at
Washington, the one in the upper and the other in the lower House.
In 1858 they were opposing candidates for United States Senator; and
finally, to complete the remarkable counterpart, both were candidates
for the Presidency in 1860. While it is true that their ambitions ran
in parallel lines, yet they were exceedingly unlike in all other
particulars.

     * December 3d.

Douglas was short,--something over five feet high,--heavy set, with a
large head, broad shoulders, deep chest, and striking features. He was
polite and affable, but fearless. He had that unique trait, magnetism,
fully developed in his nature, and that attracted a host of friends
and readily made him a popular idol. He had had extensive experience in
debate, and had been trained by contact for years with the great minds
and orators in Congress. He was full of political history, well
informed on general topics, eloquent almost to the point of brilliancy,
self-confident to the point of arrogance, and a dangerous competitor in
every respect. What he lacked in ingenuity he made up in strategy, and
if in debate he could not tear down the structure of his opponent's
argument by a direct and violent attack, he was by no means reluctant
to resort to a strained restatement of the latter's position or to the
extravagance of ridicule. Lincoln knew his man thoroughly and well.*

     * An erroneous impression has grown up in recent years
     concerning Douglas's ability and standing as a lawyer. One
     of the latest biographies of Lincoln credits him with many
     of the artifices of the "shyster." This is not only unfair,
     but decidedly untrue. I always found Douglas at the bar to
     be a broad, fair, and liberal-minded man. Although not a
     thorough student of the law his large fund of good common-
     sense kept him in the front rank. He was equally generous
     and courteous, and he never stooped to gain a case. I know
     that Lincoln entertained the same view of him. It was only
     in politics that Douglas demonstrated any want of
     inflexibility and rectitude, and then only did Lincoln
     manifest a lack of faith in his morals.

He had often met Douglas on the stump; was familiar with his tactics,
and though fully aware of his "want of fixed political morals," was not
averse to measuring swords with the elastic and flexible "Little Giant."

Lincoln himself was constructed on an entirely different foundation. His
base was plain common sense, direct statement, and the inflexibility of
logic. In physical make-up he was cold--at least not magnetic--and
made no effort to dazzle people by his bearing. He cared nothing for
a following, and though he had often before struggled for a political
prize, yet in his efforts he never had strained his well-known spirit of
fairness or open love of the truth. He analyzed everything, laid every
statement bare, and by dint of his broad reasoning powers and
manliness of admission inspired his hearers with deep conviction of his
earnestness and honesty. Douglas may have electrified the crowds with
his eloquence or charmed them with his majestic bearing and dexterity in
debate, but as each man, after the meetings were over and the applause
had died away, went to his home, his head rang with Lincoln's logic and
appeal to manhood.

A brief description of Mr. Lincoln's appearance on the stump and of his
manner when speaking may not be without interest. When standing erect
he was six feet four inches high. He was lean in flesh and ungainly in
figure. Aside from the sad, pained look due to habitual melancholy, his
face had no characteristic or fixed expression. He was thin through the
chest, and hence slightly stoop-shouldered. When he arose to address
courts, juries, or crowds of people, his body inclined forward to a
slight degree. At first he was very awkward, and it seemed a real labor
to adjust himself to his surroundings. He struggled for a time under a
feeling of apparent diffidence and sensitiveness, and these only added
to his awkwardness. I have often seen and sympathized with Mr. Lincoln
during these moments. When he began speaking, his voice was shrill,
piping, and unpleasant. His manner, his attitude, his dark, yellow
face, wrinkled and dry, his oddity of pose, his diffident
movements--everything seemed to be against him, but only for a short
time. After having arisen, he generally placed his hands behind him, the
back of his left hand in the palm of his right, the thumb and fingers
of his right hand clasped around the left arm at the wrist. For a few
moments he played the combination of awkwardness, sensitiveness, and
diffidence. As he proceeded he became somewhat animated, and to keep in
harmony with his growing warmth his hands relaxed their grasp and fell
to his side. Presently he clasped them in front of him, interlocking his
fingers, one thumb meanwhile chasing another. His speech now requiring
more emphatic utterance, his fingers unlocked and his hands fell apart.
His left arm was thrown behind, the back of his hand resting against
his body, his right hand seeking his side. By this time he had gained
sufficient composure, and his real speech began. He did not gesticulate
as much with his hands as with his head. He used the latter frequently,
throwing it with vim this way and that. This movement was a significant
one when he sought to enforce his statement. It sometimes came with
a quick jerk, as if throwing off electric sparks into combustible
material. He never sawed the air nor rent space into tatters and rags
as some orators do. He never acted for stage effect. He was cool,
considerate, reflective--in time self-possessed and self-reliant.
His style was clear, terse, and compact. In argument he was logical,
demonstrative, and fair. He was careless of his dress, and his clothes,
instead of fitting neatly as did the garments of Douglas on the latter's
well-rounded form, hung loosely on his giant frame. As he moved along
in his speech he became freer and less uneasy in his movements; to
that extent he was graceful. He had a perfect naturalness, a strong
individuality; and to that extent he was dignified. He despised glitter,
show, set forms, and shams. He spoke with effectiveness and to move the
judgment as well as the emotions of men. There was a world of meaning
and emphasis in the long, bony finger of his right hand as he dotted
the ideas on the minds of his hearers. Sometimes, to express joy or
pleasure, he would raise both hands at an angle of about fifty degrees,
the palms upward, as if desirous of embracing the spirit of that which
he loved. If the sentiment was one of detestation--denunciation of
slavery, for example--both arms, thrown upward and fists clenched, swept
through the air, and he expressed an execration that was truly sublime.
This was one of his most effective gestures, and signified most vividly
a fixed determination to drag down the object of his hatred and trample
it in the dust. He always stood squarely on his feet, toe even with toe;
that is, he never put one foot before the other. He neither touched nor
leaned on anything for support. He made but few changes in his positions
and attitudes. He never ranted, never walked backward and forward on
the platform. To ease his arms he frequently caught hold, with his left
hand, of the lapel of his coat, keeping his thumb upright and leaving
his right hand free to gesticulate. The designer of the monument
recently erected in Chicago has happily caught him in just this
attitude. As he proceeded with his speech the exercise of his vocal
organs altered somewhat the tone of his voice. It lost in a measure its
former acute and shrilling pitch, and mellowed into a more harmonious
and pleasant sound. His form expanded, and, notwithstanding the sunken
breast, he rose up a splendid and imposing figure. In his defence of
the Declaration of Independence--his greatest inspiration--he was
tremendous in the directness of his utterances; he rose to impassioned
eloquence, unsurpassed by Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, or Vergniaud, as his
soul was inspired with the thought of human right and Divine justice.*
His little gray eyes flashed in a face aglow with the fire of his
profound thoughts; and his uneasy movements and diffident manner sunk
themselves beneath the wave of righteous indignation that came sweeping
over him. Such was Lincoln the orator.

     * Horace White, who was present and reported the speech for
     his paper, the Chicago Tribune. Letter, June 9, 1865, MS.

We can somewhat appreciate the feeling with which Douglas, aggressive
and fearless though he was, welcomed a contest with such a man as
Lincoln. Four years before, in a joint debate with him, he had asked
for a cessation of forensic hostilities, conceding that his opponent
of rail-splitting fame had given him "more trouble than all the United
States Senate together." Now he was brought face to face with him
again.*

     * "Douglas and I, for the first time this canvass, crossed
     swords here yesterday. The fire flew some, and I am glad to
     know I am yet alive."--Lincoln to J. O. Cunningham, Ottawa,
     Ill., August 22, 1858, MS.

It is unnecessary and not in keeping with the purpose of this work to
reproduce here the speeches made by either Lincoln or Douglas in their
justly renowned debate. Briefly stated, Lincoln's position was announced
in his opening speech at Springfield: "'A house divided against itself
cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not
expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all the one thing or the other. Either the opponents
of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where
the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of
ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it
becomes alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as
well as South." The position of Douglas on the question of slavery was
one of indifference. He advocated with all his power the doctrine of
"Popular Sovereignty," a proposition, as quaintly put by Lincoln, which
meant that, "if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man has a
right to object." At the last joint discussion in Alton, Lincoln, after
reflecting on the patriotism of any man who was so indifferent to the
wrong of slavery that he cared not whether it was voted up or down,
closed his speech with this stirring summary: "That [slavery] is the
real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when
these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It
is the eternal struggle between these two principles--right and
wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles that have
stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue
to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the
divine right of kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it
develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work and toil
and earn bread, and I eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether
from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own
nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men
as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical
principle."

It is unnecessary, I presume, to insert here the seven questions which
Douglas propounded to Lincoln at their first meeting at Ottawa, nor the
historic four which Lincoln asked at Freeport. It only remains to say
that in answering Lincoln at

Freeport, Douglas accomplished his own political downfall. He was
swept entirely away from his former foundation, and even the glory of a
subsequent election to the Senate never restored him to it.

During the canvass Mr. Lincoln, in addition to the seven meetings
with Douglas, filled thirty-one appointments made by the State
Central Committee, besides speaking at many other times and places not
previously advertised. In his trips to and fro over the State, between
meetings, he would stop at Springfield sometimes, to consult with his
friends or to post himself up on questions that occurred during the
canvass. He kept me busy hunting up old speeches and gathering facts and
statistics at the State library. I made liberal clippings bearing in any
way on the questions of the hour from every newspaper I happened to see,
and kept him supplied with them; and on one or two occasions, in answer
to letters and telegrams, I sent books forward to him. He had a little
leather bound book, fastened in front with a clasp, in which he and I
both kept inserting newspaper slips and newspaper comments until the
canvass opened. In arranging for the joint meetings and managing the
crowds Douglas enjoyed one great advantage. He had been United
States Senator for several years, and had influential friends holding
comfortable government offices all over the State. These men were on
hand at every meeting, losing no opportunity to applaud lustily all the
points Douglas made and to lionize him in every conceivable way. The
ingeniously contrived display of their enthusiasm had a marked effect
on certain crowds--a fact of which Lincoln frequently complained to
his friends. One who accompanied him during the canvass* relates this:
"Lincoln and I were at the Centralia agricultural fair the day after the
debate at Jonesboro. Night came on and we were tired, having been on
the fair grounds all day. We were to go north on the Illinois Central
railroad. The train was due at midnight, and the depot was full of
people. I managed to get a chair for Lincoln in the office of the
superintendent of the railroad, but small politicians would intrude so
that he could scarcely get a moment's sleep. The train came and was
filled instantly. I got a seat near the door for Lincoln and myself.
He was worn out, and had to meet Douglas the next day at Charleston. An
empty car, called a saloon car, was hitched on to the rear of the
train and locked up. I asked the conductor, who knew Lincoln and myself
well,--we were both attorneys of the road,--if Lincoln could not ride
in that car; that he was exhausted and needed rest; but the conductor
refused. I afterwards got him in by a stratagem. At the same time George
B. McClellan in person was taking Douglas around in a special car and
special train; and that was the unjust treatment Lincoln got from
the Illinois Central railroad. Every interest of that road and every
employee was against Lincoln and for Douglas."

     * Henry C. Whitney, MS., July 21, 1865.

The heat and dust and bonfires of the campaign at last came to an end.
The election took place on the second of November, and while Lincoln
received of the popular vote a majority of over four thousand, yet the
returns from the legislative districts foreshadowed his defeat. In fact,
when the Senatorial election took place in the Legislature, Douglas
received fifty-four and Lincoln forty-six votes--one of the results of
the lamentable apportionment law then in operation.*

     * Horace Greeley was one of the most vigilant men during the
     debate. He wrote to Lincoln and me many letters which I
     still retain. In a letter to me during the campaign, October
     6, he says with reference to Douglas: "In his present
     position I could not of course support him, but he need not
     have been in this position had the Republicans of Illinois
     been as wise and far-seeing as they are earnest and true....
     but seeing things are as they are, I do not wish to be
     quoted as authority for making trouble and division among
     our friends." Soon after hearing of the result of November
     election he again writes: "I advise you privately that Mr.
     Douglas would be the strongest candidate that the Democratic
     party could present for President; but they will not present
     him. The old leaders wouldn't endorse it. As he is doomed to
     be slaughtered at Charleston it is good policy to fatten him
     meantime. He will cut up the better at killing time." An
     inquiry for his preference as to Presidential timber
     elicited this response, December 4th. "As to President, my
     present judgment is Edward Bates, with John M. Read for
     Vice; but I am willing to go anything that looks strong. I
     don't wish to load the team heavier than it will pull
     through. As to Douglas, he is like the man's boy who (he
     said) 'didn't weigh so much as he expected, and he always
     knew he wouldn't.' I never thought him very sound coin; but
     I didn't think it best to beat him on the back of his anti-
     Lecompton fight, and I am still of that opinion."

The letters of Lincoln at this period are the best evidence of his
feelings now obtainable, and of how he accepted his defeat. To Henry
Asbury, a friend who had written him a cheerful letter admonishing him
not to give up the battle, he responded;

"Springfield, November 19, 1858.

"Mr. Henry Asbury,

"My Dear Sir:--Yours of the 13th was received some days ago. The fight
must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the
end of one or even one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be
supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down and
to uphold the slave interest. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic
elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come.

"Yours truly,

"A. Lincoln."

To another friend* on the same day he writes:

     * Dr. Henry.

"I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and
durable questions of the age which I could have had in no other way; and
though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have
made some marks which will tell for the cause of liberty long after I am
gone." Before passing to later events in Mr. Lincoln's life it is proper
to include in this chapter, as a specimen of his oratory at this time,
his eloquent reference to the Declaration of Independence found in a
speech delivered at Beardstown, August 12, and not at Lewiston five days
later, as many biographers have it. Aside from its concise reasoning,
the sublime thought it suggests entitles it to rank beside that great
masterpiece, his Gettysburg address. After alluding to the suppression
by the Fathers of the Republic of the slave trade, he says: "These by
their representatives in old Independence Hall said to the whole race of
men: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.' This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the
universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of
the justice of the Creator to his creatures--yes, gentlemen, to all
his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened
belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into
the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows.
They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they
reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a
beacon to guide their children, and their children's children, and
the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise
statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed
tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that
when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should
set up the doctrine that none but rich men, none but white men, or
none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the
Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which
their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the
humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land;
so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great
principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

"Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with
the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have
listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and
mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined
to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable
rights enumerated by our chart of liberty: let me entreat you to come
back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of
the Revolution. Think nothing of me; take no thought for the political
fate of any man whomsoever, but come back to the truths that are in the
Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if
you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat
me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While
pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated
in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I
charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's
success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But
do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity--the Declaration of
American Independence."

One of the newspaper men* who heard this majestic oration wrote me as
follows:

     * Horace White, MS., May 17, 1865.

"The apostrophe to the Declaration of Independence to which you refer
was written by myself from a vivid recollection of Mr. Lincoln's speech
at Beardstown, August 12, 1858. On the day following the delivery of the
speech, as Mr. Lincoln and I were proceeding by steamer from Beardstown
to Havana, I said to him that I had been greatly impressed by his
concluding remarks of the day previous, and that if he would write them
out for me I felt confident their publication would be highly beneficial
to our cause as well as honorable to his own fame. He replied that he
had but a faint recollection of any portion of the speech; that, like
all his campaign speeches, it was necessarily extemporaneous; and that
its good or bad effect depended upon the inspiration of the moment.
He added that I had probably overestimated the value of the remarks
referred to. In reply to my question whether he had any objection to my
writing them out from memory and putting them in the form of a verbatim
report, he said, 'None at all.' I accordingly did so. I felt confident
then and I feel equally assured now that I transcribed the peroration
with absolute fidelity as to ideas and commendable fidelity as to
language. I certainly aimed to reproduce his exact words, and my
recollection of the passage as spoken was very clear. After I had
finished writing I read it to Mr. Lincoln. When I had finished the
reading he said, 'Well, those are my views, and if I said anything on
the subject I must have said substantially that, but not nearly so well
as that is said.' I remember this remark quite distinctly, and if the
old steamer _Editor_ is still in existence I could show the place
where we were sitting. Having secured his assent to the publication I
forwarded it to our paper, but inasmuch as my report of the Beardstown
meeting had been already mailed I incorporated the remarks on the
Declaration of Independence in my letter from Lewiston two or three days
subsequently.... I do not remember ever having related these facts before,
although they have often recurred to me as I have seen the peroration
resuscitated again and again, and published (with good effect, I trust)
in the newspapers of this country and England."




CHAPTER IV.

The importance of a more accurate and elaborate history of the debate
between Lincoln and Douglas has induced Mr. Weik and me to secure,
for publication in these pages, the account by Horace White, of this
world-renowned forensic contest. Mr. White's means of knowledge, as
fully set forth in the article, are exceptional, and his treatment of
the subject is not less entertaining than truthful. It is certainly a
great contribution to history and we insert it without further comment:

"It was my good fortune to accompany Mr. Lincoln during his political
campaign against Senator Douglas in 1858, not only at the joint debates
but also at most of the smaller meetings where his competitor was not
present. We traveled together many thousands of miles. I was in the
employ of the _Chicago Tribune_, then called the _Press and Tribune_.
Senator Douglas had entered upon his campaign with two short-hand
reporters, James B. Sheridan and Henry Binmore, whose duty it was to
'write it up' in the columns of the Chicago Times. The necessity of
counteracting or matching that force became apparent very soon, and I
was chosen to write up Mr. Lincoln's campaign.

"I was not a short-hand reporter. The verbatim reporting for the Chicago
Tribune in the joint debates was done by Mr. Robert R. Hitt, late
Assistant Secretary of State, and the present Representative in Congress
from the 6th District of Illinois. Verbatim reporting was a new feature
in journalism in Chicago, and Mr. Hitt was the pioneer thereof. The
publication of Senator Douglas's opening speech in that campaign,
delivered on the evening of July 9th, by the Tribune the next morning,
was a feat hitherto unexampled in the West, and most mortifying to the
Democratic newspaper, the _Times_, and to Sheridan and Binmore, who,
after taking down the speech as carefully as Mr. Hitt had done, had gone
to bed intending to write it out next day, as was then customary.

"All of the seven joint debates were reported by Mr. Hitt for the
_Tribune_, the manuscript passing through my hands before going to the
printers, but no changes were made by me except in a few cases where
confusion on the platform; or the blowing of the wind, had caused some
slight hiatus or evident mistake in catching the speaker's words. I
could not resist the temptation to _italicise_ a few passages in Mr.
Lincoln's speeches, where his manner of delivery had been especially
emphatic.

"The volume containing the debates, published in 1860 by Follett,
Foster & Co., of Columbus, Ohio, presents Mr. Lincoln's speeches as they
appeared in the Chicago _Tribune_, and Mr. Douglas's as they appeared
in the Chicago _Times_. Of course, the speeches of both were published
simultaneously in both papers. The Chicago _Times_' reports of Mr.
Lincoln's speeches were not at all satisfactory to Mr. Lincoln's
friends, and this led to a charge that they were purposely mutilated
in order to give his competitor a more scholarly appearance before the
public--a charge indignantly denied by Sheridan and Binmore. There was
really no foundation for this charge. Of course, Sheridan and Binmore
took more pains with Mr. Douglas's speeches than with those of his
opponent. That was their business. It was what they were paid for, and
what they were expected to do. The debates were all held in the open
air, on rude platforms hastily put together, shaky, and overcrowded
with people. The reporters' tables were liable to be jostled and their
manuscript agitated by the wind. Some gaps were certain to occur in the
reporters' notes and these, when occurring in Mr. Douglas's speeches,
would certainly be straightened out by his own reporters, who would feel
no such responsibility for the rough places in Mr. Lincoln's. Then it
must be added that there were fewer involved sentences in Mr. Douglas's
_extempore_ speeches than in Mr. Lincoln's. Douglas was the more
practiced and more polished speaker of the two, and it was easier for a
reporter to follow him. All his sentences were round and perfect in his
mind before he opened his lips. This was not always the case with Mr.
Lincoln's.

"My acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln began four years before the campaign
of which I am writing, in October, 1854. I was then in the employ of the
Chicago _Evening Journal_. I had been sent to Springfield to report the
political doings of State Fair week for that newspaper. Thus it came
about that I occupied a front seat in the Representatives' Hall, in the
old State House, when Mr. Lincoln delivered the speech already described
in this volume. The impression made upon me by the orator was quite
overpowering.

"I had not heard much political speaking up to that time. I have heard
a great deal since. I have never heard anything since, either by Mr.
Lincoln, or by anybody, that I would put on a higher plane of oratory.
All the strings that play upon the human heart and understanding were
touched with masterly skill and force, while beyond and above all skill
was the overwhelming conviction pressed upon the audience that the
speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to
his fellow men. This conscientious impulse drove his arguments through
the heads of his hearers down into their bosoms, where they made
everlasting lodgment. I had been nurtured in the Abolitionist faith,
and was much more radical than Mr. Lincoln himself on any point where
slavery was concerned, yet it seemed to me, when this speech was
finished, as though I had had a very feeble conception of the wickedness
of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. I was filled, as never before, with
the sense of my own duty and responsibility as a citizen toward the
aggressions of the slave power.

"Having, 'since then, heard all the great public speakers of this
country subsequent to the period of Clay and Webster, I award the palm
to Mr. Lincoln as the one who, although not first in all respects, would
bring more men, of doubtful or hostile leanings, around to his way of
thinking by talking to them on a platform, than any other.

"Although I heard him many times afterward I shall longest remember him
as I then saw the tall, angular form with the long, angular arms, at
times bent nearly double with excitement, like a large flail animating
two smaller ones, the mobile face wet with perspiration which he
discharged in drops as he threw his head this way and that like a
projectile--not a graceful figure, yet not an ungraceful one. After
listening to him a few minutes, when he had got well warmed with his
subject, nobody would mind whether he was graceful or not. All thought
of grace or form would be lost in the exceeding attractiveness of what
he was saying.

"Returning to the campaign of 1858--I was sent by my employers to
Springfield to attend the Republican State Convention of that year.
Again I sat at a short distance from Mr. Lincoln when he delivered the
'house-divided-against-itself' speech, on the 17th of June. This was
delivered from manuscript, and was the only one I ever heard him deliver
in that way. When it was concluded he put the manuscript in my hands and
asked me to go to the _State Journal_ office and read the proof of it.
I think it had already been set in type. Before I had finished this task
Mr. Lincoln himself came into the composing room of the _State Journal_
and looked over the revised proofs. He said to me that he had taken a
great deal of pains with this speech, and that he wanted it to go before
the people just as he had prepared it. He added that some of his friends
had scolded him a good deal about the opening paragraph and 'the house
divided against itself,' and wanted him to change it or leave it out
altogether, but that he believed he had studied this subject more deeply
than they had, and that he was going to stick to that text whatever
happened.

"On the 9th of July, Senator Douglas returned to Chicago from Washington
City. He had stopped a few days at Cleveland, Ohio, to allow his friends
to arrange a grand _entree_ for him. It was arranged that he should
arrive about eight o'clock in the evening by the Michigan Central
Railway, whose station was at the foot of Lake street, in which street
the principal hotel, the Tremont House, was situated, and that he should
be driven in a carriage drawn by six horses to the hotel, where
he should make his first speech of the campaign. To carry out this
arrangement it was necessary that he should leave the Michigan Southern
Railway at Laporte and go to Michigan City, at which place the Chicago
committee of reception took him in charge. It was noted by the Chicago
_Times_ that some malicious person at Michigan City had secretly spiked
the only cannon in the town, so that the Douglas men were obliged to use
an anvil on the occasion.

"When Mr. Douglas and his train arrived at the Lake street station, the
crowd along the street to the hotel, four or five blocks distant, was
dense, and, for the Chicago of that day, tremendous. It was with great
difficulty that the six-horse team got through it at all. Banners, bands
of music, cannon and fireworks added their various inspiration to the
scene. About nine o'clock Mr. Douglas made his appearance on a balcony
on the Lake street side of the hotel and made his speech. Mr. Lincoln
sat in a chair just inside the house, very near the speaker, and was an
attentive listener.

"Mr. Douglas's manner on this occasion was courtly and conciliatory. His
argument was plausible but worthless--being, for the most part, a
rehash of his 'popular sovereignty' dogma; nevertheless, he made a good
impression. He could make more out of a bad case, I think, than any
other man this country has ever produced, and I hope the country will
never produce his like again in this particular. If his fate had been
cast in the French Revolution, he would have out-demagogued the whole
lot of them. I consider the use he made of this chip called popular
sovereignty, riding upon it safely through some of the stormiest
years in our history, and having nothing else to ride upon, a feat of
dexterity akin to genius. But mere dexterity would not alone have borne
him along his pathway in life. He had dauntless courage, unwearied
energy, engaging manners, boundless ambition, unsurpassed powers of
debate, and strong personal magnetism. Among the Democrats of the North
his ascendency was unquestioned and his power almost absolute. He was
exactly fitted to hew his way to the Presidency, and he would have done
so infallibly if he had not made the mistake of coquetting with slavery.
This was a mistake due to the absence of moral principle. If he had been
as true to freedom as Lincoln was he would have distanced Lincoln in
the race. It was, in fact, no easy task to prevent the Republicans from
flocking after him in 1858, when he had, for once only, sided with them,
in reference to the Lecompton Constitution. There are some reasons
for believing that Douglas would have separated himself from the
slave-holders entirely after the Lecompton fight, if he had thought that
the Republicans would join in re-electing him to the Senate. Yet the
position taken by the party in Illinois was perfectly sound. Douglas was
too slippery to make a bargain with. He afterward redeemed himself in
the eyes of his opponents by an immense service to the Union, which no
other man could have rendered; but, up to this time, there was nothing
for anti slavery men to do but to beat him if they could.

"I will add here that I had no personal acquaintance with Mr. Douglas,
although my opportunities for meeting him were frequent. I regarded him
as the most dangerous enemy of liberty, and, therefore, as my enemy.
I did not want to know him. Accordingly, one day when Mr. Sheridan
courteously offered to present me to his chief, I declined without
giving any reason. Of course, this was a mistake; but, at the age of
twenty-four, I took my politics very seriously. I thought that all the
work of saving the country had to be done then and there. I have since
learned to leave something to time and Providence.

"Mr. Lincoln's individual campaign began at Beardstown, Cass county,
August 12th. Douglas had been there the previous day, and I had heard
him. His speech had consisted mainly of tedious repetitions of 'popular
sovereignty,' but he had taken occasion to notice Lincoln's conspiracy
charge, and had called it 'an infamous lie.' He had also alluded to
Senator Trumbull's charge that he (Douglas) had, two years earlier, been
engaged in a plot to force a bogus constitution on the people of Kansas
without giving them an opportunity to vote upon it. 'The miserable,
craven-hearted wretch,' said Douglas, 'he would rather have both ears
cut off than to use that language in my presence, where I could call him
to account.' Before entering upon this subject, Douglas turned to his
reporters and said 'Take this down.' They did so and it was published a
few days later in the St. Louis Republican. This incident furnished
the text of the Charleston joint debate on the 18th of September.

"Mr. Douglas's meeting at Beardstown was large and enthusiastic, but was
composed of a lower social stratum than the Republican meeting of the
following day. Mr. Lincoln came up the Illinois River from the town of
Naples in the steamer _Sam Gaty_. Cass county and the surrounding region
was by no means hopeful Republican ground. Yet Mr. Lincoln's friends
mustered forty horsemen and two bands of music, beside a long procession
on foot to meet him at the landing. Schuyler county sent a delegation of
three hundred, and Morgan county was well represented. These were mostly
Old Line Whigs who had followed Lincoln in earlier days. Mr. Lincoln's
speech at Beardstown was one of the best he ever made in my hearing, and
was not a repetition of any other. In fact, he never repeated himself
except when some remark or question from the audience led him back upon
a subject that he had already discussed. Many times did I marvel to see
him get on a platform at some out-of-the-way place and begin an entirely
new speech, equal, in all respects, to any of the joint debates, and
continue for two hours in a high strain of argumentative power and
eloquence, without saying anything that I had heard before. After the
Edwardsville meeting I said to him that it was wonderful to me that he
could find new things to say everywhere, while Douglas was parroting his
popular sovereignty speech at every place. He replied that Douglas was
not lacking in versatility, but that he had a theory that the popular
sovereignty speech was the one to win on, and that the audiences whom he
addressed would hear it only once and would never know whether he made
the same speech elsewhere or not, and would never care. Most likely, if
their attention were called to the subject, they would think that was
the proper thing to do. As for himself, he said that he could not
repeat to-day what he had said yesterday. The subject kept enlarging and
widening in his mind as he went on, and it was much easier to make a new
speech than to repeat an old one.

"It was at Beardstown that Mr. Lincoln uttered the glowing words
that have come to be known as the apostrophe to the Declaration of
Independence, the circumstances attending which are narrated in another
part of this book. Probably the apostrophe, as printed, is a trifle more
florid than as delivered, and, therefore, less forcible.

"The following passage, from the Beardstown speech, was taken down by
me on the platform by long-hand notes and written out immediately
afterward:

THE CONSPIRACY CHARGE.

"'I made a speech in June last in which I pointed out, briefly and
consecutively, a series of public measures leading directly to the
nationalization of slavery--the spreading of that institution over all
the Territories and all the States, old as well as new, North as well as
South. I enumerated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which, every
candid man must acknowledge, conferred upon emigrants to Kansas and
Nebraska the right to carry slaves there and hold them in bondage,
whereas formerly they had no such right; I alluded to the events which
followed that repeal, events in which Judge Douglas's name figures quite
prominently; I referred to the Dred Scott decision and the extraordinary
means taken to prepare the public mind for that decision; the efforts
put forth by President Pierce to make the people believe that, in the
election of James Buchanan, they had endorsed the doctrine that slavery
may exist in the free Territories of the Union--the earnest exhortation
put forth by President Buchanan to the people to stick to that decision
whatever it might be--the close-fitting niche in the Nebraska bill,
wherein the right of the people to govern themselves is made 'subject to
the constitution of the United States'--the extraordinary haste made
by Judge Douglas to give this decision an endorsement at the capitol of
Illinois. I alluded to other concurring circumstances, which I need not
repeat now, and I said that, though I could not open the bosoms of men
and find out their secret motives, yet, when I found the framework of
a barn, or a bridge, or any other structure, built by a number of
carpenters--Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James--and so built that
each tenon had its proper mortice, and the whole forming a symmetrical
piece of workmanship, I should say that those carpenters all worked on
an intelligible plan, and understood each other from the beginning.
This embraced the main argument in my speech before the Republican State
Convention in June. Judge Douglas received a copy of my speech some two
weeks before his return to Illinois. He had ample time to examine and
reply to it if he chose to do so. He did examine and he did reply to it,
but he wholly overlooked the body of my argument, and said nothing
about the 'conspiracy charge,' as he terms it. He made his speech up of
complaints against our tendencies to negro equality and amalgamation.
Well, seeing that Douglas had had the process served on him, that he had
taken notice of the process, that he had come into court and pleaded
to a part of the complaint, but had ignored the main issue, I took
a default on him. I held that he had no plea to make to the general
charge. So when I was called on to reply to him, twenty-four hours
afterward, I renewed the charge as explicitly as I could. My speech was
reported and published on the following morning, and, of course, Judge
Douglas saw it. He went from Chicago to Bloomington and there made
another and longer speech, and yet took no notice of the 'conspiracy
charge.' He then went to Springfield and made another elaborate
argument, but was not prevailed upon to know anything about the
outstanding indictment. I made another speech at Springfield, this
time taking it for granted that Judge Douglas was satisfied to take his
chances in the campaign with the imputation of the conspiracy hanging
over him. It was not until he went into a small town, Clinton, in De
Witt county, where he delivered his fourth or fifth regular speech, that
he found it convenient to notice this matter at all. At that place
(I was standing in the crowd when he made his speech ), he bethought
himself that he was charged with something, and his reply was that his
'self-respect alone prevented him from calling it a falsehood.' Well,
my friends, perhaps he so far lost his self-respect in Beardstown as to
actually call it a falsehood.

"'But now I have this reply to make: that while the Nebraska bill was
pending, Judge Douglas helped to vote down a clause giving the people of
the Territories the right to exclude slavery if they chose; that neither
while the bill was pending, nor at any other time, would he give his
opinion whether the people had the right to exclude slavery, though
respectfully asked; that he made a report, which I hold in my hand, from
the Committee on Territories, in which he said the rights of the people
of the Territories, in this regard, are 'held in abeyance,' and cannot
be immediately exercised; that the Dred Scott decision expressly denies
any such right, but declares that neither Congress nor the Territorial
Legislature can keep slavery out of Kansas and that Judge Douglas
endorses that decision. All these charges are new; that is, I did not
make them in my original speech. They are additional and cumulative
testimony. I bring them forward now and dare Judge Douglas to deny one
of them. Let him do so and I will prove them by such testimony as shall
confound him forever. I say to you, that it would be more to the purpose
for Judge Douglas to say that he did not repeal the Missouri Compromise;
that he did not make slavery possible where it was impossible before;
that he did not leave a niche in the Nebraska bill for the Dred Scott
decision to rest in; that he did not vote down a clause giving the
people the right to exclude slavery if they wanted to; that he did not
refuse to give his individual opinion whether a Territorial Legislature
could exclude slavery; that he did not make a report to the Senate, in
which he said that the rights of the people, in this regard, were held
in abeyance and could not be immediately exercised; that he did not make
a hasty endorsement of the Dred Scott decision over at Springfield;*
that he does not now endorse that decision; that that decision does not
take away from the Territorial Legislature the right to exclude slavery;
and that he did not, in the original Nebraska bill, so couple the words
State and Territory together that what the Supreme Court has done in
forcing open all the Territories to slavery it may yet do in forcing
open all the States. I say it would be vastly more to the point for
Judge Douglas to say that he did not do some of these things; that he
did not forge some of these links of testimony, than to go vociferating
about the country that possibly he may hint that somebody is a liar.'

     * This refers to Douglas's speech of June 12, 1857.

"The next morning, August 13th, we boarded the steamer _Editor_ and went
to Havana, Mason county. Mr. Lincoln was in excellent spirits. Several
of his old Whig friends were on board, and the journey was filled up
with politics and story-telling. In the latter branch of human affairs,
Mr. Lincoln was most highly gifted. From the beginning to the end of our
travels the fund of anecdotes never failed, and, wherever we happened to
be, all the people within ear-shot would begin to work their way up
to this inimitable storyteller. His stories were always _apropos_ of
something going on, and oftenest related to things that had happened in
his own neighborhood. He was constantly being reminded of one, and, when
he told it, his facial expression was so irresistibly comic that the
bystanders generally exploded in laughter before he reached what he
called the 'nub' of it. Although the intervals between the meetings
were filled up brimful with mirth in this way, Mr. Lincoln indulged very
sparingly in humor in his speeches. I asked him one day why he did not
oftener turn the laugh on Douglas. He replied that he was too much in
earnest, and that it was doubtful whether turning the laugh on anybody
really gained any votes.

"We arrived at Havana while Douglas was still speaking. The deputation
that met Mr. Lincoln at the landing suggested that he should go up
to the grove where the Democratic meeting was going on and hear what
Douglas was saying. But he declined to do so, saying: 'The Judge was
so put out by my listening to him at Bloomington and Clinton that I
promised to leave him alone at his own meetings for the rest of the
campaign. I understand that he is calling Trumbull and myself liars, and
if he should see me in the crowd he might be so ashamed of himself as
to omit the most telling part of his argument.' I strolled up to the
Douglas meeting just before its conclusion, and there met a friend who
had heard the whole. He was in a state of high indignation. He said
that Douglas must certainly have been drinking before he came on the
platform, because he had called Lincoln 'a liar, a coward, a wretch and
a sneak.'

"When Mr. Lincoln replied, on the following day, he took notice of
Douglas's hard words in this way:

"I am informed that my distinguished friend yesterday became a little
excited, nervous (?) perhaps, and that he said something about fighting,
as though looking to a personal encounter between himself and me. Did
anybody in this audience hear him use such language? (Yes, Yes.) I am
informed, further, that somebody in his audience, rather more excited or
nervous than himself, took off his coat and offered to take the job
off Judge Douglas's hands and fight Lincoln himself. Did anybody here
witness that warlike proceeding? (Laughter and cries of 'yes.') Well,
I merely desire to say that I shall fight neither Judge Douglas nor his
second. I shall not do this for two reasons, which I will explain. In
the first place a fight would prove nothing which is in issue in this
election. It might establish that Judge Douglas is a more muscular man
than myself, or it might show that I am a more muscular man than Judge
Douglas. But this subject is not referred to in the Cincinnati platform,
nor in either of the Springfield platforms. Neither result would prove
him right or me wrong. And so of the gentleman who offered to do his
fighting for him. If my fighting Judge Douglas would not prove
any thing, it would certainly prove nothing for me to fight his
bottle-holder. My second reason for not having a personal encounter with
Judge Douglas is that I don't believe he wants it himself. He and I are
about the best friends in the world, and when we get together he would
no more think of fighting me than of fighting his wife. Therefore,
when the Judge talked about fighting he was not giving vent to any
ill-feeling of his own, but was merely trying to excite--well, let us
say enthusiasm against me on the part of his audience. And, as I find he
was tolerably successful in this, we will call it quits.'

"At Havana I saw Mrs. Douglas (_nee_ Cutts) standing with a group of
ladies a short distance from the platform on which her husband was
speaking, and I thought I had never seen a more queenly face and figure.
I saw her frequently afterward in this campaign, but never personally
met her till many years later, when she had become the wife of General
Williams of the regular army, and the mother of children who promised
to be as beautiful as herself. There is no doubt in my mind that this
attractive presence was very helpful to Judge Douglas in the campaign.
It is certain that the Republicans considered her a dangerous element.

"From Havana we went to Lewistown and thence to Peoria, still following
on the heels of the Little Giant, but nothing of special interest
happened at either place. As we came northward Mr. Lincoln's meetings
grew in size, but at Lewistown the Douglas gathering was much the larger
of the two and was the most considerable in point of numbers I had yet
seen.

"The next stage brought us to Ottawa, the first joint debate, August
21st. Here the crowd was enormous. The weather had been very dry and
the town was shrouded in dust raised by the moving populace. Crowds were
pouring into town from sunrise till noon in all sorts of conveyances,
teams, railroad trains, canal boats, cavalcades, and processions on
foot, with banners and inscriptions, stirring up such clouds of dust
that it was hard to make out what was underneath them. The town was
covered with bunting, and bands of music were tooting around every
corner, drowned now and then by the roar of cannon. Mr. Lincoln came by
railroad and Mr. Douglas by carriage from La Salle. A train of seventeen
passenger cars from Chicago attested the interest felt in that city in
the first meeting of the champions. Two great processions escorted them
to the platform in the public square. But the eagerness to hear the
speaking was so great that the crowd had taken possession of the square
and the platform, and had climbed on the wooden awning overhead, to such
an extent that the speakers and the committees and reporters could not
get to their places. Half an hour was consumed in a rough-and-tumble
skirmish to make way for them, and, when finally this was accomplished,
a section of the awning gave way with its load of men and boys, and
came down on the heads of the Douglas committee of reception. But,
fortunately, nobody was hurt.

"Here I was joined by Mr. Hitt and also by Mr. Chester P. Dewey of
the New York _Evening Post_, who remained with us until the end of the
campaign. Hither, also, came quite an army of young newspaper men, among
whom was Henry Villard, in behalf of Forney's Philadelphia Press. I have
preserved Mr. Dewey's sketch of the two orators as they appeared on the
Ottawa platform, and I introduce it here as a graphic description by a
new hand:

"'Two men presenting wider contrasts could hardly be found, as the
representatives of the two great parties. Everybody knows Douglas, a
short, thick-set, burly man, with large, round head, heavy hair, dark
complexion, and fierce, bull-dog look. Strong in his own real power, and
skilled by a thousand conflicts in all the strategy of a hand-to-hand or
a general fight; of towering ambition, restless in his determined
desire for notoriety, proud, defiant, arrogant, audacious, unscrupulous,
'Little Dug' ascended the platform and looked out impudently and
carelessly on the immense throng which surged and struggled before him.
A native of Vermont, reared on a soil where no slave stood, he came
to Illinois a teacher, and from one post to another had risen to his
present eminence. Forgetful of the ancestral hatred of slavery to which
he was the heir, he had come to be a holder of slaves, and to owe much
of his fame to continued subservience to Southern influence.

"'The other--Lincoln--is a native of Kentucky, of poor white parentage,
and, from his cradle, has felt the blighting influence of the dark and
cruel shadow which rendered labor dishonorable and kept the poor in
poverty, while it advanced the rich in their possessions. Reared in
poverty, and to the humblest aspirations, he left his native State,
crossed the line into Illinois, and began his career of honorable
toil. At first a laborer, splitting rails for a living--deficient in
education, and applying himself even to the rudiments of knowledge--he,
too, felt the expanding power of his American manhood, and began to
achieve the greatness to which he has succeeded. With great difficulty,
struggling through the tedious formularies of legal lore, he was
admitted to the bar, and rapidly made his way to the front ranks of
his profession. Honored by the people with office, he is still the same
honest and reliable man. He volunteers in the Black Hawk war, and does
the State good service in its sorest need. In every relation of life,
socially and to the State, Mr. Lincoln has been always the pure and
honest man. In physique he is the opposite to Douglas. Built on the
Kentucky type, he is very tall, slender and angular, awkward even
in gait and attitude. His face is sharp, large-featured and
unprepossessing. His eyes are deep-set under heavy brows, his forehead
is high and retreating, and his hair is dark and heavy. In repose, I
must confess that 'Long Abe's' appearance is not comely. But stir him
up and the fire of his genius plays on every feature. His eye glows
and sparkles; every lineament, now so ill-formed, grows brilliant and
expressive, and you have before you a man of rare power and of strong
magnetic influence. He _takes_ the people every time, and there is no
getting away from his sturdy good sense, his unaffected sincerity and
the unceasing play of his good humor, which accompanies his close logic
and smoothes the way to conviction. Listening to him on Saturday,
calmly and unprejudiced, I was convinced that he had no superior as
a stump-speaker. He is clear, concise and logical, his language is
eloquent and at perfect command. He is altogether a more fluent speaker
than Douglas, and in all the arts of debate fully his equal. The
Republicans of Illinois have chosen a champion worthy of their heartiest
support, and fully equipped for the conflict with the great Squatter
Sovereign.'

"One trifling error of fact will be noticed by the readers of these
volumes in Mr. Dewey's sketch. It relates to Douglas, and it is proper
to correct it here. Mr. Douglas was never a slave-holder. As a trustee
or guardian, he held a plantation in Louisiana with the slaves thereon,
which had belonged to Col. Robert Martin, of North Carolina, the
maternal grandfather of his two sons by his first marriage. It is a fact
that Douglas refused to accept this plantation and its belongings as a
gift to himself from Colonel Martin in the life-time of the latter. It
was characteristic of him that he declined to be an owner of slaves, not
because he sympathized with the Abolitionists, but because, as he said
once in a debate with Senator Wade, 'being a Northern man by birth, by
education and residence, and intending always to remain such, it was
impossible for me to know, understand, and provide for the happiness of
those people.'

"At the conclusion of the Ottawa debate, a circumstance occurred which,
Mr. Lincoln said to me afterwards, was extremely mortifying to him.
Half a dozen Republicans, roused to a high pitch of enthusiasm for their
leader, seized him as he came down from the platform, hoisted him upon
their shoulders and marched off with him, singing the 'Star Spangled
Banner,' or 'Hail Columbia,' until they reached the place where he was
to spend the night. What use Douglas made of this incident, is known to
the readers of the joint debates. He said a few days later, at Joliet,
that Lincoln was so used up in the discussion that his knees trembled,
and he had to be carried from the platform, and he caused this to be
printed in the newspapers of his own party. Mr. Lincoln called him to
account for this fable at Jonesboro.

"The Ottawa debate gave great satisfaction to our side. Mr. Lincoln,
we thought, had the better of the argument, and we all came away
encouraged. But the Douglas men were encouraged also. In his concluding
half hour, Douglas spoke with great rapidity and animation, and yet with
perfect distinctness, and his supporters cheered him wildly.

"The next joint debate was to take place at Freeport, six days later. In
the interval, Mr. Lincoln addressed meetings at Henry, Marshall county;
Augusta, Hancock county, and Macomb, McDonough county. During this
interval he prepared the answers to the seven questions put to him by
Douglas at Ottawa, and wrote the four questions which he propounded to
Douglas at Freeport. The second of these, viz.: 'Can the people of a
United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any
citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior
to the formation of a State Constitution?' was made the subject of a
conference between Mr. Lincoln and a number of his friends from Chicago,
among whom were Norman B. Judd and Dr. C. H. Ray, the latter the chief
editor of the Tribune. This conference took place at the town of Dixon.
I was not present, but Doctor Ray told me that all who were there
counseled Mr. Lincoln not to put that question to Douglas, because
he would answer it in the affirmative and thus probably secure his
re-election. It was their opinion that Lincoln should argue strongly
from the Dred Scott decision, which Douglas endorsed, that the people
of the Territories could not lawfully exclude slavery prior to the
formation of a State Constitution, but that he should not force Douglas
to say yes or no. They believed that the latter would let that subject
alone as much as possible in order not to offend the South, unless he
should be driven into a corner. Mr. Lincoln replied that to draw an
affirmative answer from Douglas on this question was exactly what he
wanted, and that his object was to make it impossible for Douglas to get
the vote of the Southern States in the next Presidential election. He
considered that fight much more important than the present one and he
would be willing to lose this in order to win that.*

     * Mr. Lincoln's words are given in Mr. Arnold's biography
     thus: "I am after larger game; the battle of 1860 is worth a
     hundred of this." Mr. Arnold's authority is not mentioned,
     but these are exactly the words that Doctor Ray repeated to
     me.

"The result justified Mr. Lincoln's prevision. Douglas did answer in the
affirmative. If he had answered in the negative he would have lost the
Senatorial election, and that would have ended his political career. He
took the chance of being able to make satisfactory explanations to the
slaveholders, but they would have nothing to do with him afterward.

"The crowd that assembled at Freeport on the 27th of August was even
larger than that at Ottawa. Hundreds of people came from Chicago and
many from the neighboring State of Wisconsin. Douglas came from Galena
the night before the debate, and was greeted with a great torch-light
procession. Lincoln came the following morning from Dixon, and was
received at the railway station by a dense crowd, filling up all the
adjacent streets, who shouted themselves hoarse when his tall form was
seen emerging from the train. Here, again, the people had seized upon
the platform, and all the approaches to it, an hour before the speaking
began, and a hand-to-hand fight took place to secure possession.

"After the debate was finished, we Republicans did not feel very
happy. We held the same opinion that Mr. Judd and Doctor Ray had--that
Douglas's answer had probably saved him from defeat. We did not look
forward, and we did not look South, and even if we had done so, we were
too much enlisted in this campaign to swap it for another one which
was two years distant. Mr. Lincoln's wisdom was soon vindicated by his
antagonist, one of whose earliest acts, after he returned to Washington
City, was to make a speech (February 23, 1859) defending himself against
attacks upon the 'Freeport heresy,'as the Southerners called it. In that
debate Jefferson Davis was particularly aggravating, and Douglas did not
reply to him with his usual spirit.

"It would draw this chapter out to unreasonable length, if I were to
give details of all the small meetings of this campaign. After the
Freeport joint debate, we went to Carlinville, Macoupin county, where
John M. Palmer divided the time with Mr. Lincoln. From this place we
went to Clinton, De Witt county, via Springfield and Decatur. During
this journey an incident occurred which gave unbounded mirth to Mr.
Lincoln at my expense.

"We left Springfield about nine o'clock in the evening for Decatur,
where we were to change cars and take the north-bound train on the
Illinois Central Railway. I was very tired and I curled myself up as
best I could on the seat to take a nap, asking Mr. Lincoln to wake me
up at Decatur, which he promised to do. I went to sleep, and when I
did awake I had the sensation of having been asleep a long time. It was
daylight and I knew that we should have reached Decatur before midnight.
Mr. Lincoln's seat was vacant. While I was pulling myself together, the
conductor opened the door of the car and shouted, 'State Line.' This
was the name of a shabby little town on the border of Indiana. There was
nothing to do but to get out and wait for the next train going back to
Decatur. About six o'clock in the evening I found my way to Clinton. The
meeting was over, of course, and the Chicago Tribune had lost its
expected report, and I was out of pocket for railroad fares. I wended my
way to the house of Mr. C. H. Moore, where Mr. Liacoin was staying, and
where I, too, had been an expected guest. When Mr. Lincoln saw me coming
up the garden path, his lungs began to crow like a chanticleer, and I
thought he would laugh, _sans_ intermission, an hour by his dial. He
paused long enough to say that he had fallen asleep, also, and did not
wake up till the train was starting _from_ Decatur. He had very nearly
been carried past the station himself, and, in his haste to get out, had
forgotten all about his promise to waken me. Then he began to laugh
again. The affair was so irresistibly funny, in his view, that he told
the incident several times in Washington City when I chanced to meet
him, after he became President, to any company who might be present, and
with such contagious drollery that all who heard it would shake with
laughter.

"Our course took us next to Bloomington, McLean county; Monticello,
Piatt county, and Paris, Edgar county. At the last-mentioned place
(September 8th) we were joined by Owen Lovejoy, who had never been in
that part of the State before. The fame of Lovejoy as an Abolitionist
had preceded him, however, and the people gathered around him in a
curious and hesitating way, as though he were a witch who might suddenly
give them lock-jaw or bring murrain on their cattle, if he were much
provoked. Lovejoy saw this and was greatly amused by it, and when
he made a speech in the evening, Mr. Lincoln having made his in the
day-time, he invited the timid ones to come up and feel of his horns and
examine his cloven foot and his forked tail. Lovejoy was one of the most
effective orators of his time. After putting his audience in good humor
in this way, he made one of his impassioned speeches which never failed
to gain votes where human hearts were responsive to the wrongs of
slavery. Edgar county was in the Democratic list, but this year it gave
a Republican majority on the legislative and congressional tickets, and
I think Lovejoy's speech was largely accountable for the result.

"My notes of the Paris meeting embrace the following passage from Mr.
Lincoln's speech:

WHAT IS POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY?

"'Let us inquire what Judge Douglas really invented when he introduced
the Nebraska Bill? He called it Popular Sovereignty. What does that
mean? It means the sovereignty of the people over their own affairs--in
other words, the right of the people to govern themselves. Did Judge
Douglas invent this? Not quite. The idea of Popular Sovereignty was
floating about several ages before the author of the Nebraska Bill was
born--indeed, before Columbus set foot on this continent. In the year
1776 it took form in the noble words which you are all familiar with:
'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal,' etc. Was not this the origin of Popular Sovereignty as applied
to the American people? Here we are told that governments are instituted
among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
If that is not Popular Sovereignty, then I have no conception of the
meaning of words. If Judge Douglas did not invent this kind of Popular
Sovereignty, let us pursue the inquiry and find out what kind he did
invent. Was it the right of emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska to govern
themselves, and a lot of 'niggers,' too, if they wanted them? Clearly
this was no invention of his, because General Cass put forth the same
doctrine in 1848 in his so-called Nicholson letter, six years before
Douglas thought of such a thing. Then what was it that the 'Little
Giant' invented? It never occurred to General Cass to call his discovery
by the odd name of Popular Sovereignty. He had not the face to say that
the right of the people to govern 'niggers' was the right of the people
to govern themselves. His notions of the fitness of things were
not moulded to the brazenness of calling the right to put a hundred
'niggers' through under the lash in Nebraska a 'sacred right of
self-government.' And here, I submit to you, was Judge Douglas's
discovery, and the whole of it. He discovered that the right to breed
and flog negroes in Nebraska was Popular Sovereignty.'

"The next meetings in their order were Hillsboro, Montgomery county;
Greenville, Bond county, and Edwardsville, Madison county. At
Edwardsville (September 13th) I was greatly impressed with Mr. Lincoln's
speech, so much so, that I took down the following passages, which, as I
read them now, after the lapse of thirty-one years, bring back the whole
scene with vividness before me--the quiet autumn day in the quaint old
town; the serious people clustered around the platform; Joseph Gillespie
officiating as chairman, and the tall, gaunt, earnest man, whose high
destiny and tragic death were veiled from our eyes, appealing to his old
Whig friends, and seeking to lift them up to his own level:

"'I have been requested,' he said, 'to give a concise statement of
the difference, as I understand it, between the Democratic and the
Republican parties on the leading issues of the campaign. This question
has been put to me by a gentleman whom I do not know. I do not even know
whether he is a friend of mine or a supporter of Judge Douglas in this
contest, nor does that make any difference. His question is a proper
one. Lest I should forget it, I will give you my answer before
proceeding with the line of argument I have marked out for this
discussion.

"'The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties on
the leading issues of this contest, as I understand it, is that the
former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the
latter do not consider it either a moral, a social or a political wrong;
and the action of each, as respects the growth of the country and the
expansion of our population, is squared to meet these views. I will not
affirm that the Democratic party consider slavery morally, socially
and politically right, though their tendency to that view has, in my
opinion, been constant and unmistakable for the past five years. I
prefer to take, as the accepted maxim of the party, the idea put forth
by Judge Douglas, that he 'don't care whether slavery is voted down
or voted up.' I am quite willing to believe that many Democrats would
prefer that slavery should be always voted down, and I know that some
prefer that it be always 'voted up;' but I have a right to insist that
their action, especially if it be their constant action, shall determine
their ideas and preferences on this subject. Every measure of the
Democratic party of late years, bearing directly or indirectly on
the slavery question, has corresponded with this notion of utter
indifference, whether slavery or freedom shall outrun in the race of
empire across to the Pacific--every measure, I say, up to the Dred
Scott decision, where, it seems to me, the idea is boldly suggested that
slavery is better than freedom. The Republican party, on the contrary,
hold that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of
freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil to the negro, to the
white man, to the soil, and to the State. Regarding it as an evil, they
will not molest it in the States where it exists, they will not overlook
the constitutional guards which our fathers placed around it; they will
do nothing that can give proper offense to those who hold slaves by
legal sanction; but they will use every constitutional method to prevent
the evil from becoming larger and involving more negroes, more white
men, more soil, and more States in its deplorable consequences. They
will, if possible, place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in course of ultimate peaceable extinction in God's
own good time. And to this end they will, if possible, restore the
government to the policy of the fathers--the policy of preserving the
new Territories from the baneful influence of human bondage, as the
northwestern Territories were sought to be preserved by the ordinance
of 1787, and the Compromise Act of 1820. They will oppose, in all its
length and breadth, the modern Democratic idea, that slavery is as good
as freedom, and ought to have room for expansion all over the continent,
if people can be found to carry it. All, or nearly all, of Judge
Douglas's arguments are logical, if you admit that slavery is as good
and as right as freedom, and not one of them is worth a rush if you deny
it. This is the difference, as I understand it, between the Republican
and Democratic parties....

"'My friends, I have endeavored to show you the logical consequences
of the Dred Scott decision, which holds that the people of a Territory
cannot prevent the establishment of slavery in their midst. I have
stated what cannot be gainsaid, that the grounds upon which this
decision is made are equally applicable to the free States as to the
free Territories, and that the peculiar reasons put forth by Judge
Douglas for endorsing this decision, commit him, in advance, to the next
decision and to all other decisions coming from the same source. And
when, by all these means, you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro;
when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as
the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this
world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the
darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have
roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our
own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our
bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance
against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making
us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which
God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty
as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this
spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors.
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your
own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others,
you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit
subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you. And let me
tell you, that all these things are prepared for you by the teachings
of history, if the elections shall promise that the next Dred Scott
decision and all future decisions will be quietly acquiesced in by the
people.'

"From Edwardsville we went to the Jonesboro joint debate. The audience
here was small, not more than 1,000 or 1,500, and nearly all Democrats.
This was in the heart of Egypt. The country people came into the little
town with ox teams mostly, and a very stunted breed of oxen, too. Their
wagons were old-fashioned, and looked as though they were ready to fall
in pieces. A train with three or four carloads of Douglas men came up,
with Douglas himself, from Cairo. All who were present listened to the
debate with very close attention, and there was scarcely any cheering on
either side. Of course we did not expect any in that place. The reason
why Douglas did not get much, was that Union county was a stronghold
of the 'Danites,' or Buchanan Democrats. These were a pitiful minority
everywhere except in the two counties of Union and Bureau. The reason
for this peculiarity in the two counties named, must lie in the fact
that Union county was the home of the United States Marshal for the
Southern District, W. L. Dougherty; and Bureau, that of the Marshal for
the Northern District, Charles N. Pine. Evidently both these men worked
their offices for all they were worth, and the result would seem to show
that Marshalships are peculiarly well fitted to the purpose of turning
voters from their natural leanings. In Bureau county the 'Danites'
polled more votes than the Douglas Democrats. In Union, they divided the
party into two nearly equal parts. In no other county did they muster
a corporal's guard; James W. Sheahan, the editor of the Times, told me,
with great glee, after the election, that at one of the voting places in
Chicago, where the two Democratic judges of election were Irish, a few
'Danite' votes were offered, but that the judges refused to receive
them, saying gravely, 'We don't take that kind.' They thought it was
illegal voting.

"The only thing noteworthy that I recall at Jonesboro was not political
and not even terrestrial. It was the splendid appearance of Donati's
comet in the sky, the evening before the debate. Mr. Lincoln greatly
admired this strange visitor, and he and I sat for an hour or more in
front of the hotel looking at it.

"From Jonesboro we went to Centralia, where a great State Fair was
sprawling over the prairie, but there was no speaking there. It was not
good form to have political bouts at State Fairs, and I believe that the
managers had prohibited them. After one day at this place, where great
crowds clustered around both Lincoln and Douglas whenever they appeared
on the grounds, we went to Charleston, Coles county, September 18th,
where the fourth joint debate took place.

"This was a very remarkable gathering, the like of which we had not seen
elsewhere. It consisted of a great outpouring ( or rather inpouring ) of
the rural population, in their own conveyances. There was only one line
of railroad here, and only one special train on it. Yet, to my eye,
the crowd seemed larger than at either Ottawa or Freeport, in fact the
largest of the series, except the one at Galesburg, which came later.
The campaign was now at its height, the previous debates having stirred
the people into a real fever. 'It is astonishing,' said Mr. Dewey, in
his letter from Charleston to the _Evening Post_, 'how deep an interest
in politics this people take. Over long weary miles of hot, dusty
prairie, the processions of eager partisans come on foot, on horseback,
in wagons drawn by horses or mules; men, women and children, old and
young; the half-sick just out of the last 'shake,' children in arms,
infants at the maternal fount; pushing on in clouds of dust under a
blazing sun, settling down at the town where the meeting is, with hardly
a chance for sitting, and even less opportunity for eating, waiting in
anxious groups for hours at the places of speaking; talking, discussing,
litigious, vociferous, while the roar of artillery, the music of bands,
the waving of banners, the huzzas of the crowds, as delegation after
delegation appears; the cry of peddlers vending all sorts of wares, from
an infallible cure for 'agur' to a monster water-melon in slices to suit
purchasers--combine to render the occasion one scene of confusion and
commotion. The hour of one arrives, and a perfect rush is made for the
grounds; a column of dust rising to the heavens, and fairly deluging
those who are hurrying on through it. Then the speakers come, with flags
and banners and music, surrounded by cheering partisans. Their arrival
at the grounds and immediate approach to the stand, is the signal for
shouts that rend the heavens. They are introduced to the audience amid
prolonged and enthusiastic cheers, they are interrupted by frequent
applause and they sit down finally among the same uproarious
demonstrations. The audience sit or stand patiently, throughout, and, as
the last word is spoken, make a break for their homes, first hunting up
lost members of their families, gathering their scattered wagon loads
together, and, as the daylight fades away, entering again upon the broad
prairies and slowly picking their way back to the place of beginning.'

"Both Lincoln and Douglas left the train at Mattoon, distant some
ten miles from Charleston, to accept the escort of their respective
partisans. Mattoon was then a comparatively new place, a station on
the Illinois Central Railway peopled by Northern men. Nearly the whole
population of this town turned out to escort Mr. Lincoln along the
dusty highway to Charleston. In his procession was a chariot containing
thirty-two young ladies, representing the thirty-two States of the
Union, and carrying banners to designate the same. Following this, was
one young lady on horseback holding aloft a banner inscribed, 'Kansas--I
will be free.' As she was very good looking, we thought that she would
not remain free always. The muses had been wide awake also, for, on the
side of the chariot, was the stirring legend:

     'Westward the star of empire takes its way;
     The girls link-on to Lincoln, as their mothers did to Clay.'

"The Douglas procession was likewise a formidable one. He, too, had his
chariot of young ladies, and, in addition, a mounted escort. The two
processions stretched an almost interminable distance along the road,
and were marked by a moving cloud of dust.

"Before the Charleston debate, Mr. Lincoln had received (from Senator
Trumbull, I suppose) certain official documents to prove that Douglas
had attempted, in 1856, to bring Kansas into the Union without allowing
the people to vote upon her constitution, and with these he put the
Little Giant on the defensive, and pressed him so hard that we all
considered that our side had won a substantial victory.

"The Democrats seemed to be uneasy and dissatisfied, both during the
debate and afterward. Mr. Isaac N. Arnold, in his biography of Lincoln,
page 148, relates an incident in the Charleston debate on the authority
of 'a spectator' ( not named ), to this effect: that near the end of Mr.
Lincoln's closing speech, Douglas became very much excited and walked
rapidly up and down the platform behind Lincoln, holding a watch in his
hand; that the instant the watch showed the half hour, he called out
'Sit down! Lincoln, sit down! Your time is up.'

"This must be a pure invention. My notes show nothing of the kind. I sat
on the platform within ten feet of Douglas all the time that Lincoln was
speaking. If any such dramatic incident had occurred, I should certainly
have made a note of it, and even without notes I think I should have
remembered it. Douglas was too old a campaigner to betray himself in
this manner, whatever his feelings might have been.

"After the debate was ended and the country people had mostly dispersed,
the demand for speeches was still far from being satisfied. Two meetings
were started in the evening, with blazing bonfires in the street to
mark the places. Richard J. Oglesby, the Republican nominee for Congress
(afterward General, Governor and Senator ), addressed one of them.
At the Douglas meeting, Richard T. Merrick and U. F. Linder were the
speakers. Merrick was a young lawyer from Maryland, who had lately
settled in Chicago, and a fluent and rather captivating orator. Linder
was an Old Line Whig, of much natural ability, who had sided with
the Democrats on the break-up of his own party. Later in the campaign
Douglas wrote him a letter saying: 'For God's sake, Linder, come up
here and help me.' This letter got into the newspapers, and, as a
consequence, the receiver of it was immediately dubbed, 'For-God's-Sake
Linder,' by which name he was popularly know all the rest of his days.

"There was nothing of special interest between the Charleston debate and
that which took place at Galesburg, October 7th. Here we had the largest
audience of the whole series and the worst day, the weather being very
cold and raw, notwithstanding which, the people flocked from far and
near. One feature of the Republican procession was a division of one
hundred ladies and an equal number of gentlemen on horseback as a
special escort to the carriage containing Mr. Lincoln. The whole country
seemed to be swarming and the crowd stood three hours in the college
grounds, in a cutting wind, listening

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