The setting of the spectacle had the picturesqueness of the times and the region.  The people gathered in vast multitudes, to the number of ten thousand, even of twenty thousand, at the places named for the speech-making; they came in their wagons from all the country round, bringing provisions, and making camps in the groves and fields.  There were bonfires and music, parading and drinking.  He was a singular man in Illinois who was not present at some one of these encounters.

Into a competition so momentous Lincoln entered with a full appreciation of the burden and responsibility which it put upon him.  He had at once to meet a false gloss of his famous sentence; and though he had been very precise and accurate in his phraseology for the express purpose of escaping misinterpretation, yet it would have been a marvel in applied political morals if the paraphrases devised by Douglas had been strictly ingenuous.  The favorite distortion was to alter what was strictly a forecast into a declaration of a policy, to make a prediction pass for an avowal of a purpose to wage war against slavery until either the “institution” or “Abolitionism” should be utterly defeated and forever exterminated.  It was said to be a “doctrine” which was “revolutionary and destructive of this government,” and which “invited a warfare between the North and the South, to be carried on with ruthless vengeance, until the one section or the other shall be driven to the wall and become the victim of the rapacity of the other.”  Such misrepresentation annoyed Lincoln all the more because it was undeserved.  The history of the utterance thus maltreated illustrates the deliberate, cautious, thorough way in which his mind worked.  So long ago as August 15, 1855, he had closed a letter with the paragraph:  “Our political problem now is:  Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—­forever, half slave and half free?  The problem is too mighty for me.  May God in his mercy superintend the solution."[78] This is one among many instances which show how studiously Lincoln pondered until he had got his conclusion into that simple shape in which it was immutable.  When he had found a form which satisfied him for the expression of a conviction, he was apt to use it repeatedly rather than to seek new and varied shapes, so that substantially identical sentences often recur at distant intervals of time and place.

When one has been long studying with much earnest intensity of thought a perplexing and moving question, and at last frames a conclusion with painstaking precision in perfectly clear language, it is not pleasant to have that accurate utterance misstated with tireless reiteration, and with infinite art and plausibility.  But for this vexation Lincoln could find no remedy, and it was in vain that he again and again called attention to the fact that he had expressed neither a “doctrine,” nor an “invitation,” nor any “purpose” or policy whatsoever.