Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [153]
That afternoon, Lincoln and Welles spent several hours conversing on a bench in the front of the store. Welles had read accounts of Lincoln’s debates with Douglas and had noted the extravagant reviews of his Cooper Union speech. There is no record of their conversation that day, but the prairie lawyer left a strong imprint on Welles, who watched that evening as he delivered a two-hour speech before an overflowing crowd at City Hall.
Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new metaphor in Hartford to perfectly illustrate his distinction between accepting slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road,” Lincoln began, “any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them…. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!…The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.”
The snake metaphor acknowledged the constitutional protection of slavery where it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud.” When Seward reached for a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have “introduced the Trojan horse” into the new territory. Even if most of his classically trained fellow senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln’s snake-in-the-bed story nor its memorable originality.
The morning after his City Hall speech, Lincoln met with Welles again in the office of the Hartford Evening Press. When they parted after an hour of discussion, Welles was favorably impressed. “This orator and lawyer has been caricatured. He is not Apollo, but he is not Caliban,” he wrote in the next edition of his paper. “He is [in] every way large, brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination…. He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”
Preparing to return to Springfield, Lincoln had accomplished more than he ever could have anticipated. No longer the distant frontiersman, he had made a name in the East. His possible candidacy was now widely discussed. “I have been sufficiently astonished at my success in the West,” Lincoln told a Yale professor who had praised his speech highly. “But I had no thought of any marked success at the East, and least of all that I should draw out such commendations from literary and learned men.” When James Briggs told him, “I think your chance for being the next President is equal to that of any man in the country,