[BACK IN ’58]
[BACK THERE IN ’58]
Hear ’em? Hear the Lincoln and Douglas debates? Well, I should say I did. Heard every one of ’em. Yes, sir, for about two months back there in ’58, I didn’t do a thing but travel around Illinois listenin’ to them two men argue out slavery; and when I wa’n’t listenin’ to ’em or travelin’ around after ’em, I was pretty sure to be settin’ on a fence discussin’. Fur my part I never did understand how the crops was got in that fall; seemed to me about all the men in the state was settin’ around whittlin’ and discussin’.
Made Lincoln? Yes, I reckon you might say they did. There’s no denyin’ that’s when the country outside begun to take notice of him. But don’t you make no mistake, them debates wa’n’t the beginnin’ of Abraham Lincoln’s work on slavery. He’d been at it for about four years before they come off, sweatin’ his brains night and day. The hardest piece of thinkin’ I ever see a man do. Anybody that wants to hear about him back there needn’t expect stories. He wa’n’t tellin’ stories them days. No, sir, he was thinkin’.
Curious about him. There he was, more’n forty-five years old, clean out of politics and settled down to practice law. Looked as if he wouldn’t do much of anything the rest of his life but jog around the circuit, when all of a suddint Douglas sprung his Kansas-Nebraska bill. You remember what that bill was, don’t you?—let Kansas and Nebraska in as territories and the same time repealed the Missouri Compromise keeping slavery out of that part of the country, let the people have it or not, just as they wanted. You ain’t no idee how that bill stirred up Mr. Lincoln. I’ll never forgit how he took its passin’. ’Twas long back in the spring of ’54. Lot of ’em was settin’ in here tellin’ stories and Mr. Lincoln was right in the middle of one when in bounced Billy Herndon—he was Lincoln’s law partner, you know. His eyes was blazin’ and he calls out, “They’ve upset the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska bill is passed.”
For a minute everybody was still as death—everybody but me. “Hoorah!” I calls out, “you can bet on Little Dug every time,” for I was a Democrat and, barrin’ George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, I thought Douglas was the biggest man God ever made. Didn’t know no more what that bill meant than that old Tom-cat in the window.