Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
It was a remarkable speech in many respects--and in none more than in
this, that it represented the highest expression of what might be
called his "first manner." It was the most important and the last
speech of its class which he ever delivered--not destitute of sound
and close reasoning, yet filled with boisterous fun and florid
rhetoric. It was, in short, a rattling stump speech of the kind then
universally popular in the West, and which is still considered a very
high grade of eloquence in the South. But it is of no kindred with his
inaugural addresses, and resembles the Gettysburg speech no more than
"The Comedy of Errors" resembles "Hamlet." One or two extracts will
give some idea of its humorous satire and its lurid fervor. Attacking
the corruptions and defalcations of the Administration party he said:
"Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party
and the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice
they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in
principle; and the better to impress this proposition he uses a
figurative expression in these words, 'The Democrats are vulnerable in
the heel, but they are sound in the heart and head.' The first branch
of the figure--that is, the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel--I
admit is not merely figuratively but literally true. Who that looks
but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons,
and their hundreds of others scampering away with the public money to
Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may
hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most
distressingly affected in their heels with a species of running itch?
It seems that this malady of their heels operates on the sound-headed
and honest-hearted creatures, very much as the cork leg in the comic
song did on its owner, which, when he once got started on it, the more
he tried to stop it the more it would run away. At the hazard of
wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems
to be too strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier who
was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who
invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of the
engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied,
'Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had, but
somehow or other whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run
away with it.' So with Mr. Lamborn's party--they take the public money
into their hands for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and
honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out
again, their rascally vulnerable heels will run away with them."
[Illustration: WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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