solutions,
took an opportunity to rest, supposing he could get the original from
the speaker. He took down only the first line of each resolution. He
missed Douglas after the debate, but on reaching Chicago, where he
wrote out his report, he sent an assistant to the files to find the
platform adopted at the Springfield Convention. It was brought, but
when Mr. Hitt began to transcribe it he saw at once that it was widely
different from the one Douglas had read. There was great excitement in
the office, and the staff, ardently Republican, went to work to
discover where the resolutions had come from. It was found that they
originated at a meeting of radical abolitionists with whom Lincoln had
never been associated.

The "Press and Tribune" announced the "forgery," as it was called in a
caustic editorial, "The Little Dodger Cornered and Caught." Within a
week even the remote school-districts of Illinois were discussing
Douglas's action, and many of the most important papers of the nation
had made it a subject of editorial comment.

Almost without exception Douglas was condemned. No amount of
explanation on his part helped him. "The particularity of Douglas's
charge," said the Louisville "Journal," "precludes the idea that he
was simply and innocently mistaken." Lovers of fair play were
disgusted, and those of Douglas's own party who would have applauded a
trick too clever to be discovered could not forgive him for one which
had been found out. Greeley came out bitterly against him, and before
long wrote to Lincoln and Herndon that Douglas was "like the man's boy
who (he said) didn't weigh so much as he expected and he always knew
he wouldn't."

Douglas's error became a sharp-edged sword in Lincoln's hand. Without
directly referring to it, he called his hearers' attention to the
forgery every time he quoted a document by his elaborate explanation
that he believed, unless there was some mistake on the part of those
with whom the matter originated and which he had been unable to
detect, that this was correct. Once when Douglas brought forward a
document, Lincoln blandly remarked that he could scarcely be blamed
for doubting its genuineness since the introduction of the Springfield
resolutions at Ottawa.

It was in the second debate, at Freeport, that Lincoln made the
boldest stroke of the contest. Soon after the Ottawa debate, in
discussing his plan for the next encounter, with a number of his
political friends,--Washbur