Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/321

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 257 extraordinary interest throughout the state and the country. The men were perhaps equally matched in oratorical ability and adroitness in debate, but Lincoln s superiority in moral insight, and espe cially in far-seeing political sagacity, soon became apparent. The most important and significant of the debates was that which took place at Freeport. Mr. Douglas had previously asked Mr. Lincoln a series of questions intended to embarrass him, which Lincoln without the slightest reserve answered by a categorical yes or no. At Freeport, Lincoln, taking his turn, inquired of Douglas whether the people of a territory could in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the forma tion of a state constitution. By his reply, intimat ing that slavery might be excluded by unfriendly territorial legislation, Douglas gained a momentary advantage in the anti-slavery region in which he spoke, but dealt a fatal blow to his popularity in the south, the result of which was seen two years afterward at the Charleston convention. The ground assumed by Senator Douglas was, in fact, utterly untenable, and Lincoln showed this in one of his terse sentences. "Judge Douglas holds," he said, "that a thing may lawfully be driven away from a place where it has a lawful right to go." This debate established the reputation of Mr. Lincoln as one of the leading orators of the Re-