New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [219]
The minutes passed, and Hetty seemed quite happy to look around at the crowd. Here and there she saw people she knew. Frank contented himself with calling to mind as many items as he could from the reports of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. After a while, he could not resist bringing up one of them.
“Your Mr. Lincoln believes in freedom and equality for the black man, doesn’t he, Hetty?”
“He certainly does.”
“Yet in the Illinois debates, I distinctly remember, he said that on no account would he give the black man the vote or allow him to serve on a jury. What do you think of that?”
Hetty looked at him steadily. “I think that’s very simple, dear. If he said anything else, he could never get elected.”
Frank was just about to point out that she seemed happy to make moral compromises if it suited her, when a movement at the side of the stage signaled that the proceedings were about to begin.
The gentleman who introduced the speaker did not take long about his business. Some brief, polite words about the distinguished speaker, the hope that they would accord him a good welcome, and find interest in what he was to say, and the introduction was done. He turned to bid the speaker come forward. And Abraham Lincoln appeared.
“Good God,” muttered Frank, and stared.
He’d seen one or two pictures of the man in the newspapers, and assumed they were unflattering. But nothing had quite prepared him for the shock of seeing Lincoln for the first time in the flesh.
Across the stage, walking stiffly and somewhat stooped at the shoulders, came a very tall, thin, dark-haired man. Six foot four, at least, Frank guessed. His long frock coat was black. One gangling arm hung at his side, the other was bent, for in a huge hand, he carried a sheaf of foolscap papers. When he reached the rostrum in the center of the stage, he turned to the crowd. And Frank almost gasped.
The lines in Lincoln’s clean-shaven face were so deep that they were like chasms. From under his shaggy eyebrows, his gray eyes surveyed the crowd gravely and, it seemed, without hope. Frank thought it was the saddest face he’d ever seen. Placing his hands behind his back, Lincoln continued to look at them for a moment or two longer. Then he began to speak.
And now Frank winced. He couldn’t help it. From this tall, angular man came forth a sound so high, so harsh and so unpleasing that it grated upon the ear and made the hearer wish he’d stop. This was the man the Chicago newspaper said should be president? However, as there was nothing else to do, he listened. And after a short while, he noticed several things.
In the first place, Lincoln made no attempt at high-flown rhetoric, indulged in no emotion. Simply and plainly, in a careful, lawyer-like manner, he put his first argument to them. And it was this.
His opponents, boosted by the strange Dred Scott decision, had argued that the Founding Fathers who framed the Constitution had never intended that Congress should have the right to forbid or legislate at all on slavery in any territory. So Lincoln had researched the subject, and had found evidence for twenty-one of the thirty-nine Founding Fathers—and discovered that every one of them had, in fact, legislated on precisely that question. And Washington himself had signed measures forbidding slavery in territories into law. So either the founders were denying their own Constitution, or the Constitution did indeed give Congress the right to make such decisions.
Of course, Lincoln could have simply pointed this out as a statistical and legislative fact, and added some high-flown phrases, to make his point well enough. But his rhetorical genius lay in being painstaking. Slowly, deliberately, giving the date, naming the Founding Fathers concerned, and explaining the circumstances of the case, Lincoln picked apart each vote. Again and again he did it. And each time he did so, he drew the same conclusion in almost identical words: “that nothing