was a son of that Jack Armstrong of Clary's Grove, near New Salem, whose affection Lincoln had gained by shaking him at arm's length. When a baby he had been rocked in his cradle by his father's tall friend, while his mother, Hannah Armstrong, attended to other household duties. At one time Lincoln had been almost a member of the family.

Hannah was old now, and she had no money to pay lawyers, but she had faith in her friend, and wrote him an account of her trouble. Mr. Lincoln at once replied that he would undertake the defense, but the heartbroken old woman managed to travel to Springfield that she might tell him all she knew about the matter, and win his honest help as well as his sympathy.

It seemed a hopeless case, for the evidence against Armstrong was clear and positive and not at all circumstantial. It appeared to be inevitable that he would be convicted not of manslaughter but of murder, and that he would surely be hanged for his crime, and as the principal offender.

Mr. Lincoln appeared in court on the day of trial, but gave over the verbal management of the witnesses to his colleague in the case, Mr. Walker, who had already made a study of it. He himself did little more than to suggest questions and keenly watch for the way of escape which no other man in the court-room believed could be discovered.

The proof of murder was complete. Good witnesses testified to having seen Armstrong commit the deed, by the light of a nearly full moon shining high in a cloudless heaven. Until Mr. Lincoln arose to speak, the prisoner at the bar stood practically convicted, and the jury could have given against him a verdict of "guilty" without leaving their seats.

The evidence, however, was only too perfect. It was too nicely fitted and adjusted, and when taken up in the hands of a master it came to pieces and could be put together again in another shape so as to show that the murder was not committed then and there by that man, but elsewhere, afterwards, and

by other hands. The speaker went on step by step until he was ready to call upon the clerk of the court for an almanac which he had previously placed in his hands for the purpose. Then he asked the jury to note the fact that at the alleged hour of the murder, instead of the splendor of moonlight sworn to by the prosecuting witnesses, there was no moon at all and darkness reigned.

Court, jury, lawyers, burst into a roar of astonished laughter; but the moment it died away Mr. Lincoln launched out into a speech which has been described by all who heard it as wonderfully eloquent. All said that it saved the life of Armstrong, without reference to the testimony so skillfully pulled to pieces, by its touching description of his own early struggles and the kindness then shown him by the now widowed mother of the prisoner at the bar. He believed the young man innocent, and he made the jury believe so with him. There were tears in his voice and in his eyes, however, while he talked of those old days of hardship and toil and privation, and of the simple, rough, kindly-hearted prairie people with whom he had shared them. It was a noble appeal, full of pathos, argument, genius, eloquence, persuasive power. More than all this is such an utterance of value in the study of his life and character, by the revelation it affords of his own perpetual consciousness of the level from which he had climbed and of the inner forces by whose operation he had arisen. In this is to be found one secret of his influence over men who remained at or near that first low level, for it is more than likely that the jury before him was largely composed of such men. More than one of his most important public utterances, as President of the United States, will be found on analysis to have been framed and worded that it might reach the understandings and the hearts of that vast popular jury which is but a multiplication of country juries and the "boys" of Clary's Grove. In order that he might have and retain this power, he faithfully carried with him to the very end, half mournfully, half lov

ingly, a minute memory and understanding of all the events of his early life, and of all the persons, types of character, experiences, which thereby had been made his instructors.

When the hour came for the uses of this peculiar gift, all the Hannah Armstrongs in the country felt free to go to him about their boys, and all the Bill Armstrongs north of the Ohio River came marching at his call in serried masses of "three hundred thousand more."

Polished incapacity shuts its blind eyes unnecessarily to this very day, and sneers at the unseen lesson it might learn from the great lawyer and politician weeping genuine tears before a Cass County jury while he told them about the baby and the cradle in Jack Armstrong's log-cabin.

Poor old Hannah came back to the congratulations of the crowded court-room, from which she had fled, after the speech, "down to Thompson's pasture," remaining there until informed of the acquittal of her son. The judge shook hands with her; so did the jury; so did Abraham Lincoln, with the hot tears pouring down his face. He said a few kind words to her then, and afterwards, when she asked him how much he was going to charge her and told him she was poor, he said: "Why, Hannah, I sha'n't charge you a cent. Never. Anything I can do for you I will do for you willingly and freely without charges."

CHAPTER XXIII.

POLITICAL PROPHECY.

A Rejected Leader-A Great Convention-An Historical Speech-Nominated for United States Senator-The Joint Debates with Douglas-The Splitting of the Democratic Party-Beginnings of a Presidential Nomination-Spring 1858 to Spring 1859.

THE term for which Stephen A. Douglas had been elected to the Senate of the United States was now drawing to a close. He was, as a matter of course, a candidate for re-election; but there had been a great change in his political relations since the beginning of the Buchanan Administration. He had severed his previous connection with the Southern chiefs of the Democracy and their more subservient tools at the North. The tremendous lessons of the Frémont campaign had not been lost upon him. He saw that a large and much the more intelligent section of the Northern Democracy would go no further in submission to the arrogant demands of the slave power. He boldly and ably put himself at their head and forced them to acknowledge him as their representative. When that was accomplished, he would willingly have led them bodily into the Republican camp could he have been assured as a reward a re-election to the Senate.

Many sincere Republicans earnestly advocated the proposed coalition, but the greater number distrusted Mr. Douglas. They were willing to receive him as a recruit but not as a commanding officer. Headed by Senator Trumbull, who had now become fully identified with the new party, the Illinois Republicans determined to stand or fall by their existing organization. Having so determined, there could be but one

voice as to who should be their standard-bearer in the battle before them. When, however, in April, 1858, the Democratic State Convention met, and, after making the usual nominations for State officers, added thereto an indorsement of Mr. Douglas, it was again strongly urged by some Republicans that the great Democratic Senator was not only himself advancing in the right direction but was skillfully taking his whole party with him. It was declared to be the part of wisdom for the Republicans to name no candidate against him. They should rather accept and even triumphantly claim him as their own.

The proposition was not at all unreasonable. At that day, Mr. Douglas was quite enough of an anti-slavery man to satisfy the great majority of those who called themselves Republicans and deemed it a kind of "radicalism" to stand upon the platform of principles they had vaguely adopted for the uses of the Frémont campaign. They were somewhat in ignorance of their own immediate future. The old battle-field, with which they had grown fairly familiar, was not at all the one to which they were now to be led, neither was it in the heart or brain of Mr. Douglas to marshal them for the ground upon which they were shortly to be arrayed. If they had accepted him, as proposed, he would have led them to a sure victoryover nothing whatever. Rejecting him, they were to be led to a sure defeat, followed by a surer victory, under the orders of a captain able to see beyond the narrow consequences of the present emergency.

The Republican State Convention was called to meet at Springfield on the 16th of June. When gathered, the delegates, with their alternates, actually present numbered nearly a thousand men. They represented nearly all the old parties and fractions of parties, and were of all shades of political opinion and social standing. Owing to the peculiar composition of the population of the State of Illinois, the entire country was personally represented in that assembly. There were men there from every Northern State and from many States of the