THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
man President, it would not be thought of. Thus the fate of Douglas as a candidate for the presidency was sealed. And as he could not accept that doctrine without utterly ruining himself at the North, and was therefore bound actively to resist it, the fate of the Democratic party was sealed, too.
Lincoln had clearly foreseen this; and when, on the night before the Freeport meeting, the Republican managers had tried to dissuade him from forcing the decisive declaration from Douglas, for the reason that Douglas by a plausible answer might win the election in Illinois and with it the Senatorship. Lincoln answered that “he was after larger game than the Senatorship; that Douglas could then never be President, and that the battle of 1860 was worth a hundred of this.” The sureness of his outlook and the courageous firmness of his attitude in this crisis proved that Lincoln was not a mere follower of other men's minds, nor a mere advocate and agitator, but a real leader—a leader in the truest sense of the term. Of this I may have more to say hereafter.
I was deeply impressed by the democratic character of the spectacle I had witnessed in Illinois. On the whole it had strengthened my faith in the virtue of the democratic principle, although it had also made me more sensible of some of the dangers attending its practical realization. Here were two men, neither of whom had enjoyed any of the advantages of superior breeding or education. One of them, Lincoln, had in fact risen from home conditions so wretched that a faithful description of them severely taxes our credulity—conditions ordinarily apt to clog the intellect and to impede the development of all finer moral sensibilities. Neither of the two men had received any regular schooling calculated in any manner to prepare a person for the career of a statesman. Neither of them had in any sense been particularly favored by fortune.
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