ent,
Lincoln had entered the House as Douglas left it for the Senate, but at
the end of the term he retired from politics baffled and discouraged.
Tortured with the keen apprehension of a form and grace into which he
could never mould his crudeness, tantalized with a sense that there must
be a way for him to get a hold on his fellows and make a figure in the
history of his times, he had watched the power of Douglas grow and the
fame of Douglas spread until it seemed that Douglas's voice was always
speaking and Douglas's hand was everywhere. Patiently working out the
right and wrong of the fateful question Douglas dealt with so boldly, he
came into the impregnable position of such as hated slavery and yet
forbore to violate its sanctuary. Suddenly, with the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise, Douglas himself had opened a path for him. He went
back into politics, and took a leading part in the Anti-Nebraska
movement. Whenever opportunity offered, he combated Douglas on the
stump. The year Trumbull won the senatorship, Lincoln had first come
within a few votes of it. Risen now to the leadership of the
Republicans in Illinois, he awaited Douglas at Chicago, listened to his
opening speech, answered it the next evening, followed him into the
centre of the State, and finally proposed a series of joint debates
before the people. Douglas hesitated, but accepted, and named seven
meeting-places: Ottawa and Freeport, in the northern stronghold of the
Republicans; Galesburg, Quincy, and Charleston, in a region where both
parties had a good following; and Jonesboro and Alton, which were in
"Egypt." The first meeting was at Ottawa, in August; the last, at Alton,
in the middle of October. Meanwhile, both spoke incessantly at other
places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and
then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes
of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their
generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the
great question of the times.

Elevated side by side on wooden platforms in the open air, thrown into
relief against the low prairie sky line, the two figures take strong
hold upon the imagination: the one lean, long-limbed, uncommonly tall;
the other scarce five feet high, but compact, manful, instinct with
energy, and topped with its massive head. In voice and gesture and
manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too,