s were over, he confessed to the
young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met,
either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship and could
afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts
and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the
grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the
end of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was
called, had turned and twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed
creature from Illinois." He would indeed win the election of 1858, but
he had been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision
which cost him the Presidency in 1860.

Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in
searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of
his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal
training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have
anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of
popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands
of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp,
and could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the
"Freeport dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a
fox-hunter lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort,
"Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was probably
carefully prepared. I ADMIT THAT IT WAS."

The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master
fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any
syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's
pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or
made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul,
he invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in
Sangamon County." For although upon his intellectual side the man was a
subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the
concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing
"a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even
his invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for
specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be
that of an explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or
courtroom, then to upturned serious fac