not a single word which tended to impair the dignity of the speaker, or weaken the force of the great truths he uttered.

"The "Statesman' adds that the address 'was perfect and was closed by a peroration which brought his audience to their feet. We are not extravagant in the remark, that a political speech of greater power has rarely if ever been uttered in the Capital of New Hampshire. At its conclusion nine roof-raising cheers were given; three for the speaker, three for the Republicans of Illinois, and three for the Republicans of New Hampshire.'

"On the same evening Mr. Lincoln spoke at Manchester, to an immense gathering in Smyth's Hall. The 'Mirror,' a neutral paper, gives the following enthusiastic notice of his speech: "The audience was a flattering one to the reputation of the speaker. It was composed of persons of all sorts of political notions, earnest to hear one whose fame was so great, and we think most of them went away thinking better of him than they anticipated they should. He spoke an hour and a half with great fairness, great apparent candor, and with wonderful interest. He did not abuse the South, the Administration, or the Democrats, or indulge in any personalities, with the solitary exception of a few hits at Douglas's notions. He is far from prepossessing in personal appearance, and his voice is disagreeable, and yet he wins your attention and good will from the start.

"He indulges in no flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages; he is not a wit, a humorist or a clown; yet, so great a vein of pleasantry and good nature pervades what he says, gilding over a deep current of practical argument, he keeps his hearers in a smiling good mood with their mouths open ready to swallow all he says. His sense of the ludicrous is very keen, and an exhibition of that is the clincher of all his arguments; not the ludicrous acts of persons, but ludicrous ideas. Hence he is never offensive, and steals away willingly into his train of belief persons who are opposed to him. For the first half hour his opponents would agree with every word he uttered, and from that point he began to lead them

off, little by little, cunningly, till it seemed as if he had got them all into his fold. He displays more shrewdness, more knowledge of the masses of mankind than any public speaker we have heard since Long Jim Wilson left for California.'"

From New Hampshire Lincoln went to Connecticut, where he spent a week, speaking at Hartford, New Haven, Meridian, Woonsocket, Norwich and Bridgeport. There are no reports of the New Hampshire speeches, but two of the Connecticut speeches were published in part and one in full. Their effect was very similar, according to the newspapers of the day, to that in New Hampshire, described by the "Atlas and Bee."

By his debates with Douglas and the speeches in Ohio, Kansas, New York and New England, Lincoln had become a national figure in the minds of all the political leaders of the country, and of the thinking men of the North. Never in the history of the United States had a man come to the front in a more logical and intelligent way. At the beginning of the struggle against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, Abraham Lincoln was scarcely known outside of his own state. Even most of the men whom he had met in his brief term in Congress had forgotten him. Yet in four years he had become one of the central figures of his party; and now, by worsting the greatest orator and politician of his time, he had drawn the eyes of the nation to him.

It had been a long road he had travelled to make himself a national figure. Twenty-eight years before he had deliberately entered politics. He had been beaten, but had persisted; he had succeeded and failed;

he had abandoned the struggle and returned to his profession. His outraged sense of justice had driven him back, and for six years he had travelled up and down Illinois trying to prove to men that slavery extension was wrong. It was by no one speech, by no one argument that he had wrought. Every day his ceaseless study and pondering gave him new matter, and every speech he made was fresh. He could not repeat an old speech, he said, because the subject enlarged and widened so in his mind as he went on that it was "easier to make a new one than an old one." He had never yielded in his campaign to tricks of oratory-never played on emotions. He had been so strong in his convictions of the right of his case that his speeches had been arguments pure and simple. Their elegance was that of a demonstration in Euclid. They persuaded because they proved. He had never for a moment counted personal ambition before the cause. To insure an ardent opponent of the KansasNebraska Bill in the United States Senate, he had at one time given up his chance for the senatorship. To show the fallacy of Douglas's argument, he had asked a question which his party pleaded with him to pass by, assuring him that it would lose him the election. In every step of these six years he had been disinterested, calm, unyielding, and courageous. He knew he was right, and could afford to wait. "The result is not doubtful," he told his friends. "We shall not fail-if we stand firm. We shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it; but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come."

The country, amazed at the rare moral and intel

lectual character of Lincoln, began to ask questions about him, and then his history came out: a pioneer home, little schooling, few books, hard labor at all the many trades of the frontiersman, a profession mastered o' nights by the light of a friendly cooper's fire, an early entry into politics and law-and then twentyfive years of incessant poverty and struggle.

The homely story gave a touch of mystery to the figure which loomed so large. Men felt a sudden reverence for a mind and heart developed to these noble proportions in so unfriendly a habitat. They turned instinctively to one so familiar with strife for help in solving the desperate problem with which the nation had grappled. And thus it was that, at fifty years of age, Lincoln became a national figure.

CHAPTER XIX

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION IN 1860

THE possibility of Abraham Lincoln becoming the presidential candidate of the Republican Party in 1860 was probably first discussed by a few of his friends in 1856. The dramatic speech which in May of that year gave him the leadership of his party in Illinois, and the unexpected and flattering attention he received a few weeks later at the Republican National Convention suggested the idea; but there is no evidence that anything more was excited than a little speculation. The impression Lincoln made two years later in the Lincoln and Douglas debates kindled a different feeling. It convinced a number of astute Illinois politicians that judicious effort would make Lincoln strong enough to justify the presentation of his name as a candidate in 1860 on the ground of pure availability.

One of the first men to conceive this idea was Jesse W. Fell, a local politician of Bloomington, Illinois. During the Lincoln and Douglas debates, Fell was travelling in the Middle and Eastern States. He was surprised to find that Lincoln's speeches attracted general attention, that many papers quoted liberally from them, and that on all sides men plied him with questions about the career and personality of the new man. Before Fell left the East he had made up his mind that Lincoln must be pushed by his own state