s's supporters,
dragging one of the strongest of them--the Hon. O. B. Ficklin, with
whom he had been in Congress in 1848--to the platform.

"I do not mean to do anything with Mr. Ficklin," he said, "except to
present his face and tell you that he personally knows it to be a
lie." And Mr. Ficklin had to acknowledge that Lincoln was right.

"Judge Douglas," said Lincoln in speaking of this policy, "is playing
cuttlefish--a small species of fish that has no mode of defending
himself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid which makes
the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes."

The question at stake was too serious in Lincoln's judgment, for
platform jugglery. Every moment of his time which Douglas forced him
to spend answering irrelevant charges he gave begrudgingly. He
struggled constantly to keep his speeches on the line of solid
argument. Slowly but surely those who followed the debates began to
understand this. It was Douglas who drew the great masses to the
debates in the first place; it was because of him that the public men
and the newspapers of the East, as well as of the West, watched the
discussions. But as the days went on it was not Douglas who made the
impression.

During the hours of the speeches the two men seemed well mated. "I can
recall only one fact of the debates," says Mrs. William Crotty, of
Seneca, Illinois, "that I felt so sorry for Lincoln when Douglas was
speaking, and then to my surprise I felt so sorry for Douglas when
Lincoln replied." The disinterested to whom it was an intellectual
game, felt the power and charm of both men. Partisans had each reason
enough to cheer. It was afterwards, as the debates were talked over by
auditors as they lingered at the country store or were grouped on the
fence in the evening, or when they were read in the generous reports
which the newspapers of Illinois and even of other States gave, that
the thoroughness of Lincoln's argument was understood. Even the first
debate at Ottawa had a surprising effect. "I tell you," says Mr.
George Beatty of Ottawa, "that debate set people thinking on these
important questions in a way they hadn't dreamed of. I heard any
number of men say: 'This thing is an awfully serious question, and I
have about concluded Lincoln has got it right.' My father, a
thoughtful, God-fearing man, said to me, as we went home to supper,
'George, you are young, and don't see what this thing means, as I do.
Douglas