d,
bringing provisions, and making camps in the groves and fields. There
were bonfires and music, parading and drinking. He was a singular man in
Illinois who was not present at some one of these encounters.

Into a competition so momentous Lincoln entered with a full appreciation
of the burden and responsibility which it put upon him. He had at once
to meet a false gloss of his famous sentence; and though he had been
very precise and accurate in his phraseology for the express purpose of
escaping misinterpretation, yet it would have been a marvel in applied
political morals if the paraphrases devised by Douglas had been strictly
ingenuous. The favorite distortion was to alter what was strictly a
forecast into a declaration of a policy, to make a prediction pass for
an avowal of a purpose to wage war against slavery until either the
"institution" or "Abolitionism" should be utterly defeated and forever
exterminated. It was said to be a "doctrine" which was "revolutionary
and destructive of this government," and which "invited a warfare
between the North and the South, to be carried on with ruthless
vengeance, until the one section or the other shall be driven to the
wall and become the victim of the rapacity of the other." Such
misrepresentation annoyed Lincoln all the more because it was
undeserved. The history of the utterance thus maltreated illustrates the
deliberate, cautious, thorough way in which his mind worked. So long ago
as August 15, 1855, he had closed a letter with the paragraph: "Our
political problem now is: Can we, as a nation, continue together
_permanently_--_forever_, half slave and half free? The problem is too
mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."[78] This
is one among many instances which show how studiously Lincoln pondered
until he had got his conclusion into that simple shape in which it was
immutable. When he had found a form which satisfied him for the
expression of a conviction, he was apt to use it repeatedly rather than
to seek new and varied shapes, so that substantially identical sentences
often recur at distant intervals of time and place.

When one has been long studying with much earnest intensity of thought a
perplexing and moving question, and at last frames a conclusion with
painstaking precision in perfectly clear language, it is not pleasant to
have that accurate utterance misstated with tireless reiteration, and
with infinite art and plausibility. But f