Lincoln and his kin, Joseph Hanks and his wife, who farmed near Quincy, Illinois, where their young relative several times visited them and saluted "Uncle Joe." Joshua Speed, the only man to whom Lincoln wrote long letters on the perplexities of love and marriage. “We are dreaming dreams," he wrote Speed eventually, as though both sought more than could be realized in life. STATE FAIR WEEK 11 the black mass of people in the street listened amid huge shadows. "I have come home, as I have done so many times before, to give an account of my stewardship. I know the Democrats of Illinois. I know they always do their duty. I know, Democrats, that you will stand by me as you have always done. I am not afraid that you will be led off by those renegades from the party, Trumbull, Palmer, Judd, and Cook, who have formed an unholy alliance to turn the glorious old Democratic party over to the black Abolitionists. Democrats of Illinois, will you permit it?” And the street shook with voices en masse: "No! no! never! never!" Between the torches his blue eyes flashed, his lips trembled. "I tell you the time has not yet come when a handful of traitors in our camp can turn the great State of Illinois, with all her glorious history and traditions, into a negro-worshiping, negroequality community. Illinois has always been, and always will be, true to the Constitution and the Union." And he gracefully wished them good night; the torches, the brass band, the crowd, vanished; the street was empty. On the afternoon of the next day Douglas spoke for nearly three hours in the Statehouse. Had not the Missouri Compromise been practically wiped out by the Omnibus Bill of 1850? Was not the real question whether the people should rule, whether the voters in a Territory should control their own affairs? If the people of Kansas and Nebraska were able to govern themselves, they were able to govern a few miserable negroes. The crowd enjoyed it; cries came, "That's so!" "Hit 'em again," and, the speech over, three ringing cheers were given for the "Little Giant.' "" Lincoln had a seat up front; he whispered occasionally in the ears of friends, and they chuckled and grinned. He walked down the main aisle at Douglas's elbow, joking the senator. It was only a few years back that Douglas had loaned Lincoln a hundred dollars and Lincoln had signed a note and later paid it. They had argued on the stump, in courtrooms, churches, grocery stores. To a pretty young woman Abolitionist who told Douglas she didn't like the speech, Lincoln said: "Don't bother, young lady. We'll hang the judge's hide on the fence tomorrow." When the young woman later insisted to Lincoln that he had no business laughing and joking during such a brutal speech, Lincoln answered that maybe he ought to feel a little guilty. As to the slaveholder's way of looking at slavery, it didn't hurt him so very much. "I have heard it all my life," he said, "and as the boy said about skinning eels, it don't hurt 'em so very much; it has always been done, they're used to it." Dick Oglesby hinted to the young woman that she had been unfair to Lincoln: "He knows how to manage us sapsuckers; just let him alone." There had been a saying around courthouses, "With a good case Lincoln is the best lawyer in the state, but in a bad case Douglas is the best lawyer the state ever produced.' The next afternoon Lincoln stood before the same crowd that Douglas had spoken to. Judge Douglas had arrived at the Statehouse in an open carriage, standing with his hat in his hand bowing to a crowd that cheered him. In the carriage also were the governor of the state, Joel A. Matteson, and Douglas's colleague in the United States Senate, General James T. Shields, who had one time gone with Lincoln to a sand-bar in the Mississippi River to fight a duel. Douglas took a seat on the platform. Lincoln came in, pushing and squirming his way to the platform where he was to reply to Douglas's speech of the day before. After being introduced, he questioned whether he was just the man who should be selected to reply to the senator, mentioned the world-wide fame of Senator Douglas, the high position in the United States Senate and the power Douglas held as a debater. He was going to discuss the Missouri Compromise, presenting his own connected view of it, and in that sense his remarks would not be specifically an answer to Judge Douglas, though the main points of Judge Douglas's address would receive respectful attention. "I do not propose to question the patriotism or to assail the motives of any man or class of men, but rather to confine myself strictly to the naked merits of the question." With WHO IS TO BLAME? 13 these apologies and explanations out of the way he was set for his main speech. He began with a short history of the United States and slavery. He dug back into beginnings and traced out the growth of slavery: "Wherever slavery is it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we find concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an already existing thing." He gave five burning reasons for hating it as a "monstrous injustice." And he added: "Let me say I think I have no prejudice against the southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South. Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence. "We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go North and become tiptop Abolitionists, while some northern ones go South and become most cruel slave-masters. When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself." Was this oratory? debating? The man, Abraham Lincoln, was speaking to thousands of people as if he and another man were driving in a buggy across the prairie, exchanging their thoughts. He was saying that if all earthly power were given him he wouldn't know what to do as to slavery. There were not ships and money to send the slaves anywhere else; and when shipped anywhere else outside of America they might all die. "What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, |