Page:Lincolndouglas2184linc.djvu/177

 active life. Men, women, and children, old and young, the dwellers on the broad prairies, had turned their backs upon the plough, and had come to listen to these champions of the two parties. Military companies were out; martial music sounded, and salutes of artillery thundered in the air. Eager marshals in partisan sashes rode furiously about the streets. Peddlers were crying their wares at the corners, and excited groups of politicians were canvassing and quarreling everywhere. And still they came, the crowd swelling constantly in its proportions and growing more eager and more hungry, perhaps more thirsty, though every precaution was taken against this latter evil. About noon the rival processions were formed, and paraded the streets amid the cheers of the people. Mr. Lincoln was met at the depot by an immense crowd, who escorted him to the residence of the Mayor, with banners flying and mottoes waving their unfaltering attachment to him and to his cause. The Douglas turnout, though plentifully interspersed with the Hibernian element, was less noisy, and thus matters were arranged for the after-dinner demonstration in the Court House square, where the stand was erected, and where, under the blazing sun, unprotected by shade trees, and unprovided with seats, the audience was expected to congregate and listen to the champions.

Two men presenting wider contrasts could hardly be found as the representatives of the two great parties. Everybody knows Douglas, a short, thick-set, burly man, with large round head, heavy hair, dark complexion, and fierce bull-dog bark. Strong in his own real power, and skilled by a thousand conflicts in all the strategy of a hand-to-hand or a general fight. Of towering ambition, restless in his determined desire for notoriety; proud, defiant, arrogant, audacious, unscrupulous, "Little Dug," ascended the platform and looked out impudently and carelessly on the immense throng which surged and struggled before him. A native of Vermont, reared on a soil where no slave ever stood, trained to hard manual labor and schooled in early hardships, he came to Illinois a teacher, and from one post to another had risen to his present eminence. Forgetful of the ancestral hatred of slavery to which he was the heir, he had come to be a holder of slaves and to owe much of his fame to his continued subservience to southern influence.

The other—Lincoln—is a native of Kentucky, and of poor white parentage; and from his cradle has felt the blighting influence of the dark and cruel shadow which rendered labor dishonorable, and kept