According to a peculiar and prevalent method in the House, of spending public money for personal or partisan purposes, Lincoln availed himself of the privilege of making a campaign speech. It has met with varied comment. Lamon freely and soberly passes this judgment. "Few like it have ever been heard in either of those venerable chambers. It is a common remark of those who know nothing of the subject, that Mr. Lincoln was devoid of imagination; but the reader of this speech will entertain a different opinion. It opens to us a mind fertile in images sufficiently rare and striking, but of somewhat questionable taste. It must have been heard in amazement by those gentlemen of the House who had never known a Hanks, or seen a New Salem."[242]
Herndon, twenty years later, pronounced it a masterpiece and declared that one who would read it would lay it down convinced that Lincoln's ascendency for a quarter of a century among the political spirits in Illinois was by no means an accident, and would not wonder that Douglas, with all his forensic ability, averted, as long as he could, a contest with a man whose plain, analytical reasoning was not less potent than his mingled drollery and caricature were effective.[F]
Lincoln entered on the hard job of showing that it was sound doctrine for the President to shun defined public opinions and allow Congress its own way without hindrance from the chief executive. The history of the United States has been a vigorous answer to this contention. As President he made short shrift of that policy, though his splendid statement of the Whig position may well attract more than passing attention. He maintained that the Democrats were in favor of laying down in advance a platform as a unit, and then of forcing the people to ratify all of its provisions, however unpalatable some of them might be; that the Whigs were in favor of making Presidential elections, and the legislation of the country distinct matters; so that the people could elect whom they pleased, and afterwards legislate just as they pleased. The difference, he insisted, was as clear as noon day, and that leaving the People's business in their hands was the true Republican position.[243]
No more dramatic attack during the entire session, arraigning the Democratic candidate was made than in this speech for his attitude on the Wilmot resolution. "In 1846," says Lincoln, "General Cass was for the proviso at once; that in March, 1847, he was still for it, but not just then; and that in December, 1847, he was against it altogether. This is a true index to the whole man. When the question was raised in 1846, he was in a blustering hurry to take ground for it. He sought to be in advance, and to avoid the uninteresting position of a mere follower; but soon he began to see glimpses of the great Democratic ox-goad waving in his face, and to hear indistinctly, a voice saying, 'Back! Back, sir! Back a little!' He shakes his head and bats his eyes, and blunders back to his position of March, 1847; but still the goad waves, and the voice grows more distinct and sharper still, 'Back, sir, Back, I say! Further back!'—and back he goes to the position of December, 1847, at which the goad is still, and the voice soothingly says, 'So! Stand at that!'"[G]
That Lincoln had not fully forgotten the form of utterance that angered Darbey and has bothered most biographers since, appears in the following selection: "Like a horde of hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion to the end of his life; and you are still sticking to it, and drawing a loathsome sustenance from it, after he is dead. A fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has General Jackson's popularity been to you. You not only twice made President out of him out of it, but you have had enough of the stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another."[244]
At least it may be said that he was not the aggressor or the sole participant in such a "scathing and withering style,"[245] nor is it at all hard to find like statements and oratory in every period of our history. This is almost the last time that the historian need halt in his comment on the expression of Lincoln. Years of experience brought him to a higher conception of public utterances. When the subject matter bade exalted expression he grew to the occasion with amazing avidity.
This speech revealed Lincoln to Congress. It gained prestige among the fulminations of the session. The Baltimore American named it the "crack speech of the day." It labeled Lincoln as a very able, acute, uncouth, honest, upright man and a tremendous, wag withal.[246]
His reputation as a Congressman and orator, begot him the honorable privilege of addressing in September, the same audience in the east that often listened to the triumphant Webster. Only a faint echo of these speeches of the Illinois representative remains.
A representative Boston newspaper reports him as saying that the people of Illinois agreed entirely with the people in Massachusetts on the slavery question, except, that they did not think about it as constantly; that all agreed that slavery was an evil, which could not be affected in the slave states; but that the question of the extension of slavery to new territories was under control. In opposition to this extension Lincoln believed that the self-named "Free Soil" party was far behind the Whigs; that the "Free Soil" men in claiming that name, indirectly attempted a deception, by implying that Whigs were not free soil men; that in declaring that they would "do their duty and leave the consequences to God," merely gave an excuse for taking a course they were not able to maintain by fair argument. Making this declaration, he further argued, did not show what their duty was, that if it did there would be no use for judgment; that men might as well be made without intellect, and when divine or human law did not clearly point their duty, they had no means of finding out what it was by using their most intellectual judgment of the consequences, and that if there were divine law or human law for voting for Martin Van Buren, then he would give up the argument.[247]
New England testified to its liking for the western advocate of Taylor. The Boston Advertiser stated that at the close of his masterly speech, the audience gave three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig member from that state.[248] His Boston speech was so effective "that several Whigs who had gone off on the 'Free Soil' fizzle returned again to the Whig ranks."[249]