will detect subtle omissions which the varying character of his audience forced upon Lincoln.  In Chicago he said nothing about the physical inferiority of the negro; he said nothing about the equality of the races in the Declaration of Independence, when he spoke at Charleston.  Among men of anti-slavery leanings, he had much to say about the moral wrong of slavery; in the doubtful counties, Lincoln was solicitous that he should not be understood as favoring social and political equality between whites and blacks.

Feeling keenly this diplomatic shifting of emphasis, Douglas persisted in accusing Lincoln of inconsistency:  “He has one set of principles for the Abolition counties and another set for the counties opposed to Abolitionism.”  If Lincoln had said in Coles County what he has to-day said in old Knox, Douglas complained, “it would have settled the question between us in that doubtful county."[758] And in this Douglas was probably correct.

At Quincy, Douglas was in his old bailiwick.  Three times the Democrats of this district had sent him to Congress; and though the bounds of the congressional district had since been changed, Adams County was still Democratic by a safe majority.  Among the people who greeted the speakers, however, were many old-time Whigs, for whose special benefit the Republicans of the city carried on a pole, at the head of their procession, a live raccoon.  With a much keener historic sense, the Democrats bore aloft a dead raccoon, suspended by its tail.[759]

Lincoln again harked back to his position that slavery was “a moral, a social, and a political wrong” which the Republican party proposed to prevent from growing any larger; and that “the leading man—­I think I may do my friend Judge Douglas the honor of calling him such—­advocating the present Democratic policy, never himself says it is wrong."[760]

The consciousness that he was made to seem morally obtuse, cut Douglas to the quick.  Even upon his tough constitution this prolonged campaign was beginning to tell.  His voice was harsh and broken; and he gave unmistakable signs of nervous irritability, brought on by physical fatigue.  When he rose to reply to Lincoln, his manner was offensively combative.  At the outset, he referred angrily to Lincoln’s “gross personalities and base insinuations."[761] In his references to the Springfield resolutions and to his mistake, or rather the mistake of his friends at the capital, he was particularly denunciatory.  “When I make a mistake,” he boasted, “as an honest man, I correct it without being asked to, but when he, Lincoln, makes a false charge, he sticks to it and never corrects it."[762]

But Douglas was too old a campaigner to lose control of himself, and no doubt the rude charge and counter-charge were prompted less by personal ill-will than by controversial exigencies.  Those who have conceived Douglas as the victim of deep-seated and abiding resentment toward Lincoln, forget the impulsive nature of the man.  There is not the slightest evidence that Lincoln took these blows to heart.  He had himself dealt many a vigorous blow in times past.  It was part of the game.