Home > Authors Index > Edgar Lee Masters > Children of the Market Place > This page
Children of the Market Place, a novel by Edgar Lee Masters |
||
Chapter 57 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER LVII Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the river in Missouri. As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored Douglas. I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers. It was the fifteenth of October, fair and temperate. Thousands swarmed around the speaker's stand in the public square, which was bare of flags or mottoes by express orders of the masters of ceremony. The time arrived. Lincoln came to the platform and took a seat. He was tall, enormously tall, long of limb, angular, narrow shouldered. His skin was yellow and dry, wrinkled. His hair was black and coarse. His eyes were sunk back in his head with a melancholy expression which could flame into humor or indignation. But his forehead was full, shapely, and noble. The largeness of his nose, tilted a little to one side, gave sculptural strength to his face. His great mouth with its fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man defending the cause of the poor. There was nothing of the dreamer in his make-up, the eccentric idealist. His big nose and mouth and Henry Clay forehead denied all of this. He sat in self-possession, in poise, clothed in the order of confident reason, unafraid, sure of himself but without vanity, in a wise detachment, on a vantage point of vision. His frock coat, rusty from dust and wear, did not fit him. The sleeves escaped his wrists by several inches; his trousers had hitched up as he sat down, so that one half of his shanks was exposed to view, leaving his monstrous feet, like the slap-boots of a negro minstrel, for ludicrous inches over the floor. His neck was long and feminine, and stuck up grotesquely much above a sort of Byronic collar held together by a black stock tie. I had never seen a man so absurd. Douglas was as ludicrously short as Lincoln was tall; broad shouldered where Lincoln was narrow; thick chested where Lincoln was thin; big headed where Lincoln was small; of massive brow where Lincoln was full and shapely; of strong bull-like neck where Lincoln was small and delicate; of short, compact, powerful body where Lincoln was tall, loosely constructed, awkward, and muscular. Douglas' face wore determination, seriousness, force, pugnacity, and endurance. But his hair was grayer than mine; he looked tired. He arose and in that great melodious voice which always thrilled me, he said: "It is now nearly four months since the canvass between Mr. Lincoln and myself commenced." He went on and controverted Mr. Lincoln's "house divided against itself," going over the ground of the previous debate. There was not a sound of disturbance in the audience. They were in a charm, a trance. Oratory could rise to no greater heights. Then after saying that the Declaration of Independence did not include the negro, Indians, or Fiji Islanders, but that all dependent races should be treated nevertheless with fairness, and that it did not follow that because a negro was an inferior he must be a slave, he appealed to the rights of the states and the territories to control slavery for themselves. He closed with these memorable words: "Why can we not thus have peace? Why should we allow a sectional party to agitate this country, to array the North against the South, and convert us into enemies instead of friends merely that a few ambitious men may ride into power on a sectional hobby? How long is it since these ambitious northern men wished for a sectional organization? Did any one of them dream of a sectional party as long as the North was the weaker section and the South the stronger? Then all were opposed to sectional parties; but the moment the North obtained the majority in the House and in the Senate by the admission of California and could elect a President without the aid of southern votes, that moment ambitious men formed a scheme to excite the North against the South and make the people be governed in their votes by geographical lines, thinking that the North being the stronger section would outvote the South and consequently they, the leaders, would ride into office on a sectional hobby. I am told that my hour is out. It was very short." Short it was. I thought he had just begun. What would this strange creature now rising to six feet four inches of awkward angularity say in reply to this wonderful oration? He opened his great mouth and spoke. What is this? A falsetto note, a piping instead of the musical thunder we have heard. He poses strangely, his gestures shoot up and out like the arms of a dislocated clothes rack. He rises on his toes with a quick springlike movement, as if he were a puppet loosened by a spring from a box. He sways from side to side to give emphasis to his words. His mouth opens to huge proportions in moments of excitement. His black hair falls over his forehead. His great nose sticks out like a signboard. Is he scoring? I know, for I have read the other debates. He is wasting no words; he is meeting Douglas point by point, whether successfully or not. He seemed embarrassed, diffident at first. Why not? He is fighting a giant; then there are ugly faces in the audience, men in drink, slave owners from Missouri, Democrats who hate sectionalism and loathe the rise of the Republican party. Whispers are near me: "He amounts to nothing. Douglas has laid him out. He is scared. The Little Giant has choked him." But Lincoln goes on. His earnestness deepens, his seriousness becomes more impressive. His voice is carrying even though it pipes. He has endurance, too, and courage and fighting will. But Douglas has made it very difficult for him; indeed he has brought Lincoln to his terms on nearly everything--all but the 'house divided against itself' doctrine; and the right and duty of Congress to keep slavery out of the territories. These are issues between him and Douglas still; but is this the real issue after all? He is nearly through. He has been going on as if he were making a statement of a case. It is interjected with argument; but it is largely statement of positions. It is declaratory and follows the form of a poem, not an argument. It assumes premises; he says "I think so." It has reason back of it, but it is the reason of things proven. It is fortified by matters of general acceptance. It has logic, but the logic of things existing inherently, not made. And at last, more earnestly than before, he says: "On the point of my wanting to make war between the free and the slave states, there has been no issue between us. So too when he says that I am in favor of introducing a perfect social and political equality between the white and the black races. These are false issues upon which Judge Douglas has tried to force the controversy. There is no foundation in truth for the charges that I maintain either of these propositions. The real issue in this controversy--the one pressing upon every mind--is the sentiment upon the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. It is the sentiment around which all their actions, all their arguments, circle, from which all their propositions radiate. That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silenced. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of Time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of man as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." What had come over Lincoln? He was no longer awkward. A divine grace permeated his being. The October sun threw glory upon his brow, gave us a look into his deeply illuminated eyes, left nothing of the great nose and mouth but their strength, the sculptural impressiveness of stone features in the sides of hills. What would Serafino think if he could hear this? Then of a sudden I saw Pinturicchio in Lincoln's face, the same gentleness along the sunken cheeks, the same imaginative glow in the whole countenance. Here in this warped and homely face, this face out of the womb of poverty and sorrow, the winter loneliness of the forest, the humbleness and the want of the log cabin, the mystical yearning of humanity on the prairies and under the woodland stars, I saw for a swift moment in the glancing of the sun, as he uttered these words, the genius of the poet who knows and states, who has lived years of loneliness and failure, who has seen others grow rich, notable, and powerful, and who has remained obscure and unobeyed, with nothing but a vision which has become lightning at last in a supreme moment of inspiration. Lincoln had had his hour whatever should befall him. The debate was over--the debates were over. Reverdy and I walked away with the great crowd hurrahing for Douglas, a few hurrahing for Lincoln. I began to repeat to myself what Douglas had said years before in the Senate in replying to Webster: "There is a power in this nation greater either than the North or the South--a growing, increasing, and swelling power that will be able to speak the law of this nation and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the Great West. There, sir, is the hope of this nation--the resting place of the power that is not only to control but to save the Union." This prediction had now been fulfilled. This West had produced Lincoln and Douglas. One of them was sure to have the responsibility of executing the law as spoken. Of this I was sure. _ |
||