What was the difference between this and girding the slave states around
with freedom? That could scarcely be done without the aid of natural
processes.

But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable
legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory,
the South was drawing away from him. He was not their friend to the
extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a
slave against the will of the territory. Was Douglas unmoral? What of
the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he
syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too?
Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton
through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.

Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas
and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished. The next morning
Reverdy and I started for Alton.

I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln.

CHAPTER LVII

Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was
crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the
river in Missouri. As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored
Douglas. I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of
the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when
Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and
cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers.

It was the fifteenth of October, fair and temperate. Thousands swarmed
around the speaker's stand in the public square, which was bare of flags
or mottoes by express orders of the masters of ceremony. The time
arrived. Lincoln came to the platform and took a seat.

He was tall, enormously tall, long of limb, angular, narrow shouldered.
His skin was yellow and dry, wrinkled. His hair was black and coarse.
His eyes were sunk back in his head with a melancholy expression which
could flame into humor or indignation. But his forehead was full,
shapely, and noble. The largeness of his nose, tilted a little to one
side, gave sculptural strength to his face. His great mouth with its
fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque
caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied
piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a
countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man
defending