Across the stage, walking stiffly and somewhat stooped at the shoulders, came a very tall, thin, dark-haired man. Six foot four, at least, Frank guessed. His long frock coat was black. One gangling arm hung at his side, the other was bent, for in a huge hand, he carried a sheaf of foolscap papers. When he reached the rostrum in the center of the stage, he turned to the crowd. And Frank almost gasped.

The lines in Lincoln’s clean-shaven face were so deep that they were like chasms. From under his shaggy eyebrows, his gray eyes surveyed the crowd gravely and, it seemed, without hope. Frank thought it was the saddest face he’d ever seen. Placing his hands behind his back, Lincoln continued to look at them for a moment or two longer. Then he began to speak.

And now Frank winced. He couldn’t help it. From this tall, angular man came forth a sound so high, so harsh and so unpleasing that it grated upon the ear and made the hearer wish he’d stop. This was the man the Chicago newspaper said should be president? However, as there was nothing else to do, he listened. And after a short while, he noticed several things.

In the first place, Lincoln made no attempt at high-flown rhetoric, indulged in no emotion. Simply and plainly, in a careful, lawyer-like manner, he put his first argument to them. And it was this.

His opponents, boosted by the strange Dred Scott decision, had argued that the Founding Fathers who framed the Constitution had never intended that Congress should have the right to forbid or legislate at all on slavery in any territory. So Lincoln had researched the subject, and had found evidence for twenty-one of the thirty-nine Founding Fathers—and discovered that every one of them had, in fact, legislated on precisely that question. And Washington himself had signed measures forbidding slavery in territories into law. So either the founders were denying their own Constitution, or the Constitution did indeed give Congress the right to make such decisions.

Of course, Lincoln could have simply pointed this out as a statistical and legislative fact, and added some high-flown phrases, to make his point well enough. But his rhetorical genius lay in being painstaking. Slowly, deliberately, giving the date, naming the Founding Fathers concerned, and explaining the circumstances of the case, Lincoln picked apart each vote. Again and again he did it. And each time he did so, he drew the same conclusion in almost identical words: “that nothing in their understanding, no dividing local from Federal authority, nor anything else in the Constitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery in Federal Territory.” And as the words were repeated, not with a hammer blow, not triumphantly, but quietly and reasonably, as one man to another, the effect was devastating.