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By Root 1645 0

court once to litigate for a client who claimed patent infringement on a plow he had invented. He didn’t even show up to meet the Prince of Wales when His Royal Highness passed through Springfield in late September, lest this seem presumptuous. Curious members of the public arrived by the hundreds to shake hands with the Republican nominee, and he obliged them all. But whenever these visitors asked him for his position on one or another of the urgent issues facing the nation, he just smiled politely and suggested they refer to his published speeches, especially the series of debates he had held with Senator Douglas two years earlier. Then he might launch into an anecdote about his youthful days as a flatboatman on the Ohio River, or ask whether they’d ever heard that joke about the Kentucky hog farmer.12

Not all the presidential contenders that year were quite so coy. Lincoln’s longtime rival—Senator Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrats’ own Little Giant—was barnstorming the country. His tour had started almost surreptitiously, or so he had fancied: in July, after decorously avowing that he “would make no political speeches,” he suddenly decided to visit his elderly mother in upstate New York. En route, it just so happened that crowds showed up at every railway station, begging him to make a speech, and he could not but oblige them. Somehow, the trip from New York City to Ontario County ended up taking two months and requiring a long detour through most of New England, then a swing down to Pennsylvania and Maryland. Before long, the candidate’s journey “in search of his mother” became a national joke among Republicans. “That poor maternal relative of his must be hard to find,” one newspaper quipped. “It is said that he will next visit Japan, Algiers, Liberia, South America, and Mexico in search of her.” Then, once the long-awaited family reunion occurred, Douglas suddenly discovered that he had to take care of some urgent business in North Carolina regarding the estate of his late mother-in-law, which required an equally circuitous and loquacious pilgrimage through the South. Even worse than the public mockery was the inconsistency in what he said to audiences from region to region, as if he were oblivious to the fact that besides the thousands of locals who came out to hear him, millions of others would read his speeches in the national press, making him seem disingenuous or worse. When, several days before the election, a dock in Alabama collapsed under the weight of his supporters, tossing everyone—including Senator and Mrs. Douglas—into the water, it seemed to symbolize the collapse of the Little Giant’s presidential ambitions. Millions admired his principles; few thought him electable.13

Lincoln, on the other hand, literally couldn’t be dragged out to make a political speech. In August, thousands of supporters gathered in Springfield for a “monster meeting.” An eight-mile-long parade marched past the candidate’s house at Eighth and Jackson, and Lincoln, in a white summer suit, came out to greet them and be photographed. Finally they prevailed upon him at least to drive over in his carriage to the state fairgrounds, where thirty thousand of his followers awaited. When he arrived, the mob hauled him out of the carriage and carried him on their shoulders across the fairgrounds, landing him with a thump on the speakers’ platform. The candidate spoke only a few awkward words of appreciation to the vast assembly before he managed to wriggle off the dais, squeeze his way through the crowd, jump onto the back of a horse, and gallop off homeward as fast as the beast could carry him.14

As that dragooning in Springfield suggests, Lincoln’s candidacy was becoming a public sensation. Just a few months earlier, he had been but a former one-term congressman and failed Senate candidate from Illinois. It was more than a decade since he had even set foot in Washington. Now his bid for the presidency was riding a surge of emotion rarely seen in the annals of electoral politics. Whatever he was saying or not saying about his actual