ingly, a minute memory and understanding of all the events of his early life, and of all the persons, types of character, experiences, which thereby had been made his instructors.

When the hour came for the uses of this peculiar gift, all the Hannah Armstrongs in the country felt free to go to him about their boys, and all the Bill Armstrongs north of the Ohio River came marching at his call in serried masses of "three hundred thousand more."

Polished incapacity shuts its blind eyes unnecessarily to this very day, and sneers at the unseen lesson it might learn from the great lawyer and politician weeping genuine tears before a Cass County jury while he told them about the baby and the cradle in Jack Armstrong's log-cabin.

Poor old Hannah came back to the congratulations of the crowded court-room, from which she had fled, after the speech, "down to Thompson's pasture," remaining there until informed of the acquittal of her son. The judge shook hands with her; so did the jury; so did Abraham Lincoln, with the hot tears pouring down his face. He said a few kind words to her then, and afterwards, when she asked him how much he was going to charge her and told him she was poor, he said: "Why, Hannah, I sha'n't charge you a cent. Never. Anything I can do for you I will do for you willingly and freely without charges."

CHAPTER XXIII.

POLITICAL PROPHECY.

A Rejected Leader-A Great Convention-An Historical Speech-Nominated for United States Senator-The Joint Debates with Douglas-The Splitting of the Democratic Party-Beginnings of a Presidential Nomination-Spring 1858 to Spring 1859.

THE term for which Stephen A. Douglas had been elected to the Senate of the United States was now drawing to a close. He was, as a matter of course, a candidate for re-election; but there had been a great change in his political relations since the beginning of the Buchanan Administration. He had severed his previous connection with the Southern chiefs of the Democracy and their more subservient tools at the North. The tremendous lessons of the Frémont campaign had not been lost upon him. He saw that a large and much the more intelligent section of the Northern Democracy would go no further in submission to the arrogant demands of the slave power. He boldly and ably put himself at their head and forced them to acknowledge him as their representative. When that was accomplished, he would willingly have led them bodily into the Republican camp could he have been assured as a reward a re-election to the Senate.

Many sincere Republicans earnestly advocated the proposed coalition, but the greater number distrusted Mr. Douglas. They were willing to receive him as a recruit but not as a commanding officer. Headed by Senator Trumbull, who had now become fully identified with the new party, the Illinois Republicans determined to stand or fall by their existing organization. Having so determined, there could be but one

voice as to who should be their standard-bearer in the battle before them. When, however, in April, 1858, the Democratic State Convention met, and, after making the usual nominations for State officers, added thereto an indorsement of Mr. Douglas, it was again strongly urged by some Republicans that the great Democratic Senator was not only himself advancing in the right direction but was skillfully taking his whole party with him. It was declared to be the part of wisdom for the Republicans to name no candidate against him. They should rather accept and even triumphantly claim him as their own.

The proposition was not at all unreasonable. At that day, Mr. Douglas was quite enough of an anti-slavery man to satisfy the great majority of those who called themselves Republicans and deemed it a kind of "radicalism" to stand upon the platform of principles they had vaguely adopted for the uses of the Frémont campaign. They were somewhat in ignorance of their own immediate future. The old battle-field, with which they had grown fairly familiar, was not at all the one to which they were now to be led, neither was it in the heart or brain of Mr. Douglas to marshal them for the ground upon which they were shortly to be arrayed. If they had accepted him, as proposed, he would have led them to a sure victory— over nothing whatever. Rejecting him, they were to be led to a sure defeat, followed by a surer victory, under the orders of a captain able to see beyond the narrow consequences of the present emergency.

The Republican State Convention was called to meet at Springfield on the 16th of June. When gathered, the delegates, with their alternates, actually present numbered nearly a thousand men. They represented nearly all the old parties and fractions of parties, and were of all shades of political opinion and social standing. Owing to the peculiar composition of the population of the State of Illinois, the entire country was personally represented in that assembly. There were men there from every Northern State and from many States of the

South. An unusually large proportion were young men never before active in politics. It was to such a conclave as this that Mr. Lincoln deliberately prepared to present the issue before the country. He decided that it must be so presented that no man among them could fail to understand it.

That he would be the orator of the occasion was a matter of course, and the preparation of the speech he was to make was a task the performance of which is worthy of careful noting. It was not the work of a mere politician; it was the thoughtful expression of a human life. It came from his mind in scraps and small pieces, a sentence at a time, jotted down on fragments and slips of paper. Then at last these were gathered and put into form for delivery and for printing. All those detached segments had been growing in the speaker's thought through gloomy, toilsome years.

On the 16th of June the Convention unanimously adopted the following resolution:

"That Abraham Lincoln is our first and only choice for United States Senator, to fill the vacancy about to be created by the expiration of Mr. Douglas's term of office."

They were now pledged to their chosen chief beyond recall, and must abide by his leadership.

Mr. Lincoln had taken neither advice nor counsel in the preparation of his speech, but he saw the necessity of also preparing some of his nearer friends for what it was to be. He read it first to Mr. Herndon, the most extreme Abolitionist of his intimates, and that excellent gentleman timidly asked him :

"It is true; but is it entirely politic to speak it or read it as it is written ?"

The question referred particularly to the key-note of the speech, and Mr. Lincoln replied:

"That makes no difference. That expression is a truth of all human experience, a house divided against itself cannot stand,' and 'he that runs may read.' The proposition is indisputably true and has been true for more than six thousand

years; and I will deliver it as it is written. I want to use some universally known figure, expressed in simple language as universally known, that may strike home to the minds of men in order to rouse them to the peril of the times. I would rather be defeated with this expression in the speech, and it held up and discussed before the people, than to be victorious without it."

Having sounded the depths of Abolition courage through his friend Herndon, Mr. Lincoln proceeded to consult others, and finally gathered a dozen leading men in the Library Room of the State House, not to ask their guidance, but to assure them of his purpose by reading the speech to them, and, if possible, to form a small nucleus of favorable public opinion in advance. He read and they listened, and every man present except Mr. Herndon, who had already caught fire and was beginning to burn pretty well, condemned the bold utterance as an utter destruction of the party at the hands of its captain. It was in advance of the time. It was unwise. It was impolitic if not, indeed, untrue.

Mr. Lincoln heard them all thoughtfully. He walked up and down the room; then stood still and said to them:

"Friends, I have thought about this matter a great deal; have surveyed the question well from all corners; and am thoroughly convinced the time has come when it should be uttered and if it must be that I go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to truth,—die in the advocacy of what is right and just. This nation cannot live on injustice. A house divided against itself cannot stand,' I say again and again."

The results of his long years of study, internal strife, brooding thought, agonized wrestlings with doubt on the one side and ambition on the other, was that he planted his faith deep in a word of Jesus the Christ, and was ready to live or die by it. He saw that this was the way, the truth, and the life for him and for the nation, and all expostulation failed to move him.