oubtful 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 ex