Now, sir, that was much as three years before Mr. Lincoln said them self-same words in a speech right in this town. Seems to me I can hear him now singin’ it out shrill and far-soundin’. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. 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 all the other.” Them’s his very words. It made me cold when I heard ’em. If we wa’n’t goin’ to git on half-slave and half-free like we’d always done, what was goin’ to happen?
He hitched on another idee to this one about our becomin’ all slave or all free, which bothered me considerable—that was, that Douglas and Buchanan and the rest of the big Democrats was in a conspiracy to spread slavery all over the Union. He’d been sayin’ right along that they didn’t mind slavery spreadin’, but now he came out flat-footed and said the things they’d been doin’ in Congress and in the Supreme Court for a few years back showed that they was tryin’ to legalize slavery in all the states, north and south, old and new. He said that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and Judge Taney’s decision that Congress couldn’t keep slaves out of a territory—and the way Pierce and Buchanan had worked, fitted together like timbers for a house. “If you see a lot of timbers,” he says, “all gotten out at different times and different places by Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James”—them was the names of Douglas, Pierce, Taney and Buchanan, you know—“and you find they fit into a frame for a house, you can’t help believing them men have been workin’ on the same plan.”
I tell you that speech riled his party. They said he oughtn’t said it, if he did think it. It was too radical. They talked to him so much, tryin’ to tone him down and to keep him from doin’ it ag’in, that he flared up one day in here and he says, “Boys, if I had to take a pen and scratch out every speech I ever made except one, this speech you don’t like’s the one I’d leave.” And he says it with his head up, lookin’ as proud as if he was a Senator.
Well, somehow, as time went on, just watchin’ Mr. Lincoln so dead in earnest begun to make me feel queer. And I got serious. Never’d been so but twict before in my life—once at a revival and next time when I thought I wasn’t goin’ to git Ma. But I joined the church and Ma and me got married, and after that there didn’t seem to be anything left to worry about.
And then this comes along, and I’ll be blamed if it didn’t git so I couldn’t hear enough of it. Night after night, when they was in here discussin’, every minute I wa’n’t puttin’ up something, I was listenin’ to ’em.
And then I took to runnin’ around to hear the speeches. I was up to Bloomington in ’56 the time Lincoln went over to the Republicans. The old Whigs down here had been considerable worried for fear he would quit ’em, and I must say it worried. I never’d had any use for a man who left his party. Couldn’t understand it. Seemed to me then that ’twa’n’t no better than gittin’ a divorce from your wife. I’ve changed my views since about several things. Had to jump the party myself two or three times, and I’ve seen women— Well, all I’ve got to say is, that I ain’t judgin’ the man that gits a divorce from ’em.
As I was sayin’, I was up to Bloomington that night. Nobody that didn’t hear that speech ever knows what Abraham Lincoln could do. Lots of ’em will tell you he was homely. Seems to me sometimes that’s about all some folks around here has to tell about Abraham Lincoln. “Yes, I knowed him,” they say. “He was the homeliest man in Sangamon County.” Well, now, don’t you make no mistake. The folks that don’t tell you nuthin’ but that never knowed Mr. Lincoln. Mebbe they’d seen him, but they never knowed him. He wa’n’t homely. There’s no denyin’ he was long and lean, and he didn’t always stand straight and he wasn’t pertikeler about his clothes, but that night up to Bloomington in ten minutes after he struck that platform, I tell you he was the handsomest man I ever see.
He knew what he was doin’ that night. He knew he was cuttin’ loose. He knew them old Whigs was goin’ to have it in for him for doin’ it, and he meant to show ’em he didn’t care a red cent what they thought. He knew there was a lot of fools in that new party he was joinin’—the kind that’s always takin’ up with every new thing comes along to git something to orate about. He saw clear as day that if they got started right that night, he’d got to fire ’em up; and so he threw back his shoulders and lit in.
Good Lord! I never see anything like it. In ten minutes he was about eight feet tall; his face was white, his eyes was blazin’ fire, and he was thunderin’, “Kansas shall be free!” “Ballots, not bullets!” “We won’t go out of the Union and you sha’n’t!” Generally when he was speakin’, he was cool and quiet and things all fit together, and when you come away you was calm—but your head was workin’; but that time up to Bloomington he was like—what’s that the Bible calls it?—“avengin’ fire”—yes, sir, that’s it, he was like “avengin’ fire.” I never knew exactly what did happen there. All I recollect is that at the beginnin’ of that speech I was settin’ in the back of the room, and when I come to I was hangin’ on to the front of the platform. I recollect I looked up and seen Jo Medill standin’ on the reporter’s table lookin’ foolish-like and heard him say: “Good Lord, boys, I ain’t took a note!”
Fact was he’d stampeded that audience, reporters and all. I’ve always thought that speech made the Republican party in Illinois. It melted ’em together. ’Twa’n’t arguments they needed just then, it was meltin’ together of what they’d heard.