Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/73

 a cannon that announced his presence at each town where he spoke. Lincoln was likely to arrive shabby and haggard from an all-night ride in a day-coach. At first the rhetoric and eloquence of Douglas seemed to give him the advantage. Little by little Lincoln began to win a verdict from his audiences by the naked force of his arguments and his pitiless logic. Finally, Lincoln propounded to his opponent a question as unanswerable as the one that Christ asked the Pharisees. Whichever way he answered it Douglas would inevitably lose the support of either the North or the South. Douglas tried to compromise. By so doing he won the race for the senatorship but lost the contest for the presidency later on.

There followed the convention and campaign of 1860, and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States. Under