The "whole-hog" party had one newspaper, the opposition five. Of course it would have been impossible for Reynolds to poll a respectable vote if his loyalty to Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the ground that "it would flood the country with Yankees." It showed some moral courage, and certainly an absence of the shuffling politician's fair-weather policy, that Lincoln, in his obscure and penniless youth, at the very beginning of his career, when he was not embarrassed by antecedents or family connections, and when, in fact, what little social influence he knew would have led him the other way, chose to oppose a furiously intolerant majority, and to take his stand with the party which was doomed to long-continued defeat in Illinois. The motives which led him to take this decisive course are not difficult to imagine. The better sort of people in Sangamon County were Whigs, though the majority were Democrats, and he preferred through life the better sort to the majority. The papers he read were the Louisville "Journal" and the "Sangamo Journal," both Whig. Reading the speeches and debates of the day, he sided with Webster against Calhoun, and with Clay against anybody. Though his notions of politics, like those of any ill-educated young man of twenty-two, must have been rather crude, and not at all sufficient to live and to die by, he had adopted them honestly and sincerely, with no selfish regard to his own interests; and though he ardently desired success, he never abated one jot or tittle of his convictions for any possible personal gain, then or thereafter.