But the Republican managers had
a shrewd appreciation of both opponents; they saw that Lincoln's forte
lay in hitting out straight, direct, and hard; and they felt that blows
of the kind he delivered should not go out into the air, but should
alight upon a concrete object,--upon Douglas. They conceived a wise
plan. On July 24, 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of joint
debates. Douglas accepted, and named seven meetings, which he so
arranged that he opened and closed four times and Lincoln opened and
closed three times; but Lincoln made no point of the inequality; the
arrangement was completed, and this famous duel constituted another link
in that White House chain.
The setting of the spectacle had the picturesqueness of the times and
the region. The people gathered in vast multitudes, to the number of
ten thousand, even of twenty thousand, at the places named for the
speech-making; they came in their wagons from all the country round,
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.
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