He Knew Lincoln, and Other Billy Brown Stories

by Ida M. Tarbell

It made Little Dug awful mad to face that line of argument. He said such talk proved Lincoln was an abolitionist, and as for his bein’ in a conspiracy to spread slavery it was a lie, “an infamous lie.” Well, I always did think conspiracy was a pretty strong word for Lincoln to use. Strictly speakin’, I reckon ’twa’n’t one, but all the same it didn’t look right. Douglas couldn’t deny that when he got the Missouri Compromise repealed he let slavery into territory that the government had set aside to be free. He couldn’t deny that Judge Taney had decided that Congress couldn’t prevent people takin’ slaves into this territory. There was some other things which fitted in with these which Douglas couldn’t deny.

Mr. Lincoln argued from what they’d done that there wa’n’t any reason why they shouldn’t go on and apply the same legislation to all the other free parts of the country, said he believed they would in time if they thought it would pay better.

The more I heard ’em argue the more I felt Lincoln was right. Suppose, I says to myself, that they take it into their heads to open Illinois? What’s to stop ’em? If slaves can be took into Nebraska by the divine right of self-government, what’s to prevent the divine right of self-government lettin’ ’em in here? Of course, there was an old law settin’ aside the Northwest to freedom, but if the Missouri Compromise could be repealed, why couldn’t that? Then, again, what’s to prevent the Supreme Court decidin’ that Congress couldn’t keep slaves out of a state just as it had decided that Congress couldn’t keep ’em out of a territory. The more I thought of it the more I see there wa’n’t anything to prevent men like Douglas and Buchanan tryin’ some day to apply the same line of argument to Illinois or Pennsylvania or New York or any other free state that they was usin’ now.

I wa’n’t goin’ to stand for that. I don’t pretend I ever felt like Mr. Lincoln did about niggers. No, sir, I was a Democrat, and I wanted the South let alone. I didn’t want to hear no abolition talk. But I was dead agin’ havin’ any more slaves than we could help, and what’s more I wa’n’t myself willin’ to live in a state where they was. I’d seen enough for that. Back in the ’40’s, when I first started up this store, I used to go to New Orleans for my goods and, bein’ young, of course I had to see the sights. A man don’t go to a slave market many times without gittin’ to feel that as far as he is concerned he don’t want nuthin’ to do with buyin’ and sellin’ humans, black or white. Ma, too, she was dead set agin’ it, and she’d said many a time when I was talkin’, “William, if Mr. Douglas don’t really care whether we git to be all slave or not, you oughten to vote for him,” and I’d always said I wouldn’t. Still I couldn’t believe at first but what he did care. By the time the debates was half through I seen it clear enough, though. He didn’t care a red cent—said he didn’t. There was lots of others seen it same as me. I heard more’n one old Democrat say, “Douglas don’t care. Lincoln’s got it right, we’ve got to keep slavery back now or it’s going to spread all over the country.”

You never would believe how I felt when I seen that, for that meant goin’ back on Little Dug, leavin’ the party and votin’ for a Black Republican, as we used to call ’em. I tell you when I begun to see where I was goin’ there wa’n’t many nights I didn’t lie awake tryin’ to figure out how I could git around it. ’Twa’n’t long, though, before I got over feelin’ bad. Fact was every time I heard Mr. Lincoln—I used to go to all the speeches between debates, and there must have been twenty or thirty of them—he made it clearer. ’Twas amazin’ how every time he always had some new way of puttin’ it. Seemed as if his head was so full he couldn’t say the same thing twice alike.

One thing that made it easier was that I begun to see that Douglas wa’n’t thinkin’ much of anything but gittin elected and that Lincoln wa’n’t thinkin’ about that at all. He was dead set on makin’ us understand. Lots of people seen that the first thing. I recollect how up to Quincy that funny fellow, what do you call him? “Nasby-Petroleum V. Nasby.” Young chap then. Well, he’d come out there for some paper. Wanted to write Lincoln up. It was in the evening after the debate and Mr. Lincoln was settin’ up in his room, at the hotel with his boots off and his feet on a chair—lettin’ ’em breathe, he said. Had his coat and vest off. Nuthin’ on to speak of but his pants and one suspender—settin’ there restin’ and gassin’ with the boys when, as I started to say, Mr. Nasby come up. They had a long talk and I walked down street with him when he left.

“That Lincoln of yourn is a great man,” he says after a spell. “He ain’t botherin’ about the Senate—not a mite. He’s tryin’ to make the people of Illinois understand the danger there is in slavery spreadin’ all over the country. He’s a big man, the biggest man I’ve seen in a long time.”

Well, that sounded good to me, for that was just about what I’d figured out by that time, that Lincoln was a big man, a bigger man than Stephen A. Douglas. Didn’t seem possible to me it could be so, but the more I went over it in my mind the more certain I felt about it. Yes, sir, I’d figured it out at last what bein’ big was, that it was bein’ right thinkin’ things out straight and then hangin’ on to ’em because they was right. That was bein’ big and that was Abraham Lincoln all through—the whole of him.

That wa’n’t Douglas at all. He didn’t care whether he thought right or not, if he got what he was after. There wa’n’t no real truth in him. See what he did in the very first debate up to Ottawa. He started out up there by callin’ Lincoln an abolitionist and sayin’ he wanted a nigger wife, and to prove it read a lot of abolition resolutions which, he said Lincoln had helped git up as far back as ’54. The very next day after that debate, the Chicago Tribune came out and showed that Mr. Lincoln hadn’t ever had anything to do with the resolutions Douglas had read. Yes, sir, them resolutions had come from some measely abolition meetin’ where Mr. Lincoln had never been. Douglas had been tryin’ to play a trick on us. I tell you when that news got out you could ’a’ heard a pin drop among Illinois Democrats. It seemed as if he couldn’t realize how serious we was feelin’ or he wouldn’t try a trick like that.