She’s impressed with Davis’ speech, which focuses on the dangers of popery. He speaks simply, persuasively, and from the heart, or so it seems to Asia. She judges him chaste and elegant. He has an abundance of curly hair and a magnificent mustache. But if the crowd around her represents the party, she’s less impressed with them.

She’s almost home when a sudden downpour soaks Fanny’s flanks and mane, her own bonnet and skirt. She arrives on the porch like some drowned thing, her hair and sleeves plastered to her skin, and Rosalie brings her tea and towels, pulls her shivering and dripping inside to stand in front of the fire, stripping off her wet stockings. Thunder rattles the windows. She’d felt quite patriotic, quite engaged, while listening to the speeches. The rain has sobered her up. “I never saw such a queer collection of people,” she tells Rosalie, toweling the rain from her face and hair, but she can’t put her finger on just what was so queer about them.

John arrives hours later, after the rain has stopped and the sun gone down, with no such concerns. He’s been in the saloon with the other Know-Nothings, reliving a day of unalloyed triumph. Asia takes one look at his glowing face and tells him that the time will come when he must choose—politics or the theater. “You can’t do both,” she says. “Father always said that.”

Mother agrees.

—

Henry Winter Davis will win his race. John doesn’t know that he’s just supported a man who will devote himself to keeping Maryland in the Union, who will castigate Lincoln in the strongest possible terms for his leniency towards the South, a plan, he’ll say, that, whatever Lincoln proclaims, guarantees the return of slavery in all but name.

Lincoln and the Lost Speech

Come as the winds come, when forests are rended; Come as the waves come, when navies are stranded.

—Sir Walter Scott, as quoted by Lincoln, as remembered by witnesses to the Lost Speech

In 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois, Lincoln speaks extemporaneously at the convention where the Republican Party is being created. Some in attendance say later that this speech had such power, was limned with such divine fire, that no one who heard it was unchanged. “In a brief moment every one in that . . . assembly came to feel as one man, to think as one man and to purpose and resolve as one man. Rarely if ever was so wonderful an effect produced by an oration. It was the speech of his life in the estimation of many who heard it,” Judge John M. Scott wrote. He was quite safe in saying so, since no text survives to trouble the matter. Those reporters charged with transcription claim they were so transported they forgot to take notes.

Or else the speech’s disappearance was calculated. It seems that Lincoln, speaking off the record, allowed himself to express a more radical form of anti-slavery than his usual. It seems to have been an angry speech. Lincoln apparently argued that no compromise with slavery was possible—that the nation must either be all slaveholding or all free.