a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it, horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and then turns upon you with ’See, there is your argument.  Did I not tell you so?  You see it is all stuff.’  And if you have allowed yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not, after all, the one in question, you suppose all is over with it.  Moreover, he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions, so many piquant personalities, that by the time he has done his mystification, a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack all equally wide of the point.”

The mode of travel of the two contestants heightened the contrast.  George B. McClellan, a young engineer officer who had recently resigned from the army and was now general superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad, gave Douglas his private car and a special train.  Lincoln traveled any way he could-in ordinary passenger trains, or even in the caboose of a freight train.  A curious symbolization of Lincoln’s belief that the real conflict was between the plain people and organized money!

The debates did not develop new ideas.  It was a literary duel, each leader aiming to restate himself in the most telling, popular way.  For once that superficial definition of art applied:  “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”  Nevertheless the debates contained an incident that helped to make history.  Though Douglas was at war with the Administration, it was not certain that the quarrel might not be made up.  There was no other leader who would be so formidable at the head of a reunited Democratic party.  Lincoln pondered the question, how could the rift between Douglas and the Democratic machine be made irrevocable?  And now a new phase of Lincoln appeared.  It was the political strategist He saw that if he would disregard his own chance of election-as he had done from a simpler motive four years before—­he could drive Douglas into a dilemma from which there was no real escape.  He confided his purpose to his friends; they urged him not to do it.  But he had made up his mind as he generally did, without consultation, in the silence of his own thoughts, and once having made it up, he was inflexible.

At Freeport, Lincoln made the move which probably lost him the Senatorship.  He asked a question which if Douglas answered it one way would enable him to recover the favor of Illinois but would lose him forever the favor of the slave-holders; but which, if he answered it another way might enable him to make his peace at Washington but would certainly lose him Illinois.  The question was:  “Can the people of a United States Territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?"(5) In other words, is the Dred Scott decision good law?  Is it true that a slave-holder can take his slaves into Kansas if the people of Kansas want to keep him out?