The North was surely aroused as never before, on fire with a great and mighty excitement that rolled in waves and billows from ocean to lake, and lake to gulf. There was no general on the side of Slavery that could command all the forces. It had come to be in fact a house divided against itself. Their convention at Charleston was broken up, and Mr. Douglas nominated at Baltimore, and two other candidates, Breckenridge and Bell, elsewhere. The serpent seemed stinging itself to death. But in the great party of the North there is a solid front, no waver along the entire line. They simply fight their great political battle after the true American style of the Fathers, in a most just and righteous manner, and for a cause most just and righteous.
Mr. Blaine was on the stump, as he had been the year before, making speeches that the people loved to hear. The campaign usually closed in Maine in September, when the state officers were elected, and as the convention in Chicago was held in May, they had but three months to do the work that other states did in five months. Owing to the illness of his old friend and business partner, he edited the Kennebec Journal for five or six months during the summer and autumn of 1860, so that he was back upon his old ground during the great campaign, sitting at the same desk.
The people loved him, and he loved them. “Send us Blaine,” would come from all over the state. “We must have him, we will have him.” And he would go. It seemed as if he would go farther, do more, and get back quicker than any other man, and seemingly remember everybody.
Ex-Gov. Anson P. Morrill, his old political friend and neighbor says, “I would go out and address perhaps an acre of people, and be introduced to a lot of them, and like enough, in six months or a year, along would come a man and say, ‘How are you? Don’t you know me?’ and I would say ‘No,’ and then the man would turn and go off; but Blaine would know him as soon as he saw him coming, and say, ‘Hello,’ and call him by name right off.
“There,” he said, and he laid his gold-bowed spectacles on the table, and continued, “a little better than a year ago he was in here, and we sat at this table, and the spectacles laid there, and he took them up and said, as he looked at them closely, ‘If those are not the very same gold-bowed spectacles you bought in Philadelphia in 1856.’
“‘Why, how do you know?’ I asked in surprise.
“‘Why I was with you, and you bought them at such a place on such a street.’
“And that,” said the governor, “was twenty-six years before. Now did you ever hear of anything like that? I didn’t. Why, I’d even forgotten that he was there. I tell you that beat me; and I asked him ‘what made you think of it now?’
“‘O, I don’t know,’ said Mr. Blaine, ‘I just happened to see them lying there, and thought of it.’
“Well, it must be a good thing for you to remember things that way.”