What was the difference between this and girding the slave states around with freedom? That could scarcely be done without the aid of natural processes.
But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory, the South was drawing away from him. He was not their friend to the extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a slave against the will of the territory. Was Douglas unmoral? What of the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too? Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.
Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished. The next morning Reverdy and I started for Alton.
I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln.
CHAPTER LVII
Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the river in Missouri. As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored Douglas. I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers.
It was the fifteenth of October, fair and temperate. Thousands swarmed around the speaker's stand in the public square, which was bare of flags or mottoes by express orders of the masters of ceremony. The time arrived. Lincoln came to the platform and took a seat.
He was tall, enormously tall, long of limb, angular, narrow shouldered. His skin was yellow and dry, wrinkled. His hair was black and coarse. His eyes were sunk back in his head with a melancholy expression which could flame into humor or indignation. But his forehead was full, shapely, and noble. The largeness of his nose, tilted a little to one side, gave sculptural strength to his face. His great mouth with its fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man defending the cause of the poor. There was nothing of the dreamer in his make-up, the eccentric idealist. His big nose and mouth and Henry Clay forehead denied all of this. He sat in self-possession, in poise, clothed in the order of confident reason, unafraid, sure of himself but without vanity, in a wise detachment, on a vantage point of vision. His frock coat, rusty from dust and wear, did not fit him. The sleeves escaped his wrists by several inches; his trousers had hitched up as he sat down, so that one half of his shanks was exposed to view, leaving his monstrous feet, like the slap-boots of a negro minstrel, for ludicrous inches over the floor. His neck was long and feminine, and stuck up grotesquely much above a sort of Byronic collar held together by a black stock tie. I had never seen a man so absurd.
Douglas was as ludicrously short as Lincoln was tall; broad shouldered where Lincoln was narrow; thick chested where Lincoln was thin; big headed where Lincoln was small; of massive brow where Lincoln was full and shapely; of strong bull-like neck where Lincoln was small and delicate; of short, compact, powerful body where Lincoln was tall, loosely constructed, awkward, and muscular. Douglas' face wore determination, seriousness, force, pugnacity, and endurance. But his hair was grayer than mine; he looked tired. He arose and in that great melodious voice which always thrilled me, he said: "It is now nearly four months since the canvass between Mr. Lincoln and myself commenced."