em, are of no value whatever. If you
have to use statements in a newspaper as direct evidence, either take
them from a newspaper which is recognized as careful about facts, or
else look up the matter in two or three papers, and show that their
testimony agrees.

On the other hand, a specific name, with a specific reference to volume
and page, will go a long way to give your readers confidence in the
evidence you adduce. And rightly so, for one man with a name and address
is worth hundreds of unnamed "highest authorities"; and the more
specifically you refer to him and to his evidence, the more likely you
will be to win over your audience to your view.

A famous and effective example of the use of specific names to give
authority to an argument, and the incidental refutation of a vague and
loose assertion, is found in Lincoln's address at Cooper Institute, in
the first part of which he took up Senator Douglas's statement that "our
fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood
this question just as well as, and even better than, we do now," with
the implication that they intended to forbid the federal government to
control slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln showed that "our
fathers who framed the government under which we live" must be the
makers of the Constitution: and then he proceeded to show just what
action each one of them, so far as record had been preserved, had taken
on the question. Here is a passage from his argument:

The question of Federal control in the Territories seems not to have
been directly before the convention which framed the original
Constitution; and hence it is not recorded that the "thirty-nine," or
any of them, while engaged on that instrument, expressed any opinion on
that precise question.

In 1789, by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution, an act
was passed to enforce the ordinance of 1787, including the prohibition
of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. The bill for this act was
reported by one of the "thirty-nine"--Thomas Fitzsimmons, then a member
of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. It went through all
its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed both
branches without ayes and nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous
passage. In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers
who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon, Nicholas
Gilman, William S. Johnson, Roger Sherman, R