But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable
legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory,
the South was drawing away from him. He was not their friend to the
extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a
slave against the will of the territory. Was Douglas unmoral? What of
the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he
syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too?
Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton
through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.
Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas
and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished. The next morning
Reverdy and I started for Alton.
I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln.
CHAPTER LVII
Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was
crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the
river in Missouri. As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored
Douglas. I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of
the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when
Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and
cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers.
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