The story of Abraham Lincoln

by Mary Agnes Hamilton

The greatest debate of all was that at the meeting at Freeport. At Freeport Lincoln asked Douglas a question, against the advice of all his friends. He asked whether, if a State wanted not to have slavery, it could so decide? Lincoln knew that if Douglas said “No. A state which had slavery must keep it,” the people of Illinois would not vote for him, and he would lose this election. If he said “yes” he would be elected, and not Lincoln. Lincoln knew this; he knew that if Douglas said “yes,” he was safe, and he would say “yes.”

“Where do you come in, then?” his friends asked him. “Why do you ask him this? If you do, Douglas is sure to get in. You are ruining your own chances.”

“I do not come in anywhere,” said Lincoln; “but that does not matter. What does matter is this. If Douglas says ‘yes,’ as he will, he will get into the Senate now; but two years after this he will stand for election as President. If he says ‘yes’ now, the South will vote against him then, and he will not be elected. He must not be elected. No one who believes in spreading slavery must be elected. It does not matter about me.”

Lincoln was quite right. He saw further than any one else. Douglas said “yes,” and he was elected for Illinois. But the Democratic party in the South, whose support had made him strong, began to distrust him. “Douglas,” said Lincoln, “is followed by a crowd of blind men; I want to make some of these blind men see.”

Lincoln was defeated, but he did not think of himself. His speeches against Douglas were printed and read all over America. He was invited to speak in Ohio; and in the next year, in the beginning of 1860, a society in New York asked him to come and give them an address on politics.

A huge audience, in which were all the best known and most brilliant men of the day, gathered to hear him; an audience very much unlike any that he had addressed before. They were all anxious to see what he was like—this backwoodsman and farm-labourer, who had met the great Stephen Arnold Douglas and proved a match for him in argument; whose speeches had been printed to express the views of a whole party.

His appearance was strange and impressive. When he stood up his height was astonishing, because his legs were very long, and when sitting he did not appear tall. His face, thin and marked by deep lines, was very sad. A mass of black hair was pushed back from his high forehead: his eyebrows were black too, and stood out in his pale face: his dark-grey eyes were set deep in his head. The mouth could smile, but now it was stern and sad. The face was unlike other faces: when he spoke it was beautiful, for he felt everything he said. Abraham Lincoln was a common man: he had had no advantages of birth, of training: he had known extreme poverty: for years he had struggled without success in mean and small occupations: he had no knowledge but what he had taught himself. But no one who heard him speak could think him common.

Speaking now to an audience in which were the cleverest people in New York, people who had read everything and seen everything and been everywhere, who had had every opportunity that he had not, he impressed them as much as he had impressed the people of Illinois. He was one of the greatest orators that ever lived. His words went straight to the people to whom they were spoken. What he said was as straightforward and as certain as a sum in arithmetic, as easy to follow: and behind it all you felt that the man believed every word of what he said, and spoke because he must. The truth was in him.

Lincoln’s address in New York convinced the Republican party that here was the man they wanted.

In 1860 there came the presidential election, always the most important event in American politics; this year more important than ever before.