I s’pose you’re too young to recollect what a fuss that bill stirred up, ain’t you? Must ’a’ heard your Pa talk about it, though. Whole North got to rowin’ about it. Out here in Illinois lots of Democrats left the party on account of it, and when Douglas came back that summer they hooted him off a platform up to Chicago. You couldn’t stop Douglas that way. That just stirred up his blood. Far’s I was concerned I couldn’t see anything the matter with what he’d done. It seemed all right to me them days to let the folks that moved into Kansas and Nebraska do as Douglas had fixed it for ’em, have slaves or not, just as they was a mind to. And I tell you, when Douglas came around here and talked about “popular sovereignty,” and rolled out his big sentences about the sacred right of self-government, and said that if the white people in Nebraska was good enough to govern themselves, they was good enough to govern niggers, I felt dead sure there wa’n’t no other side to it. What bothered me was the way Mr. Lincoln kept on takin’ it. He got so he wa’n’t the same, ’peared to be in a brown study all the time. Come in here and set by the stove with the boys and not talk at all. Didn’t seem to relish my yarns either like he used to. He started in campaigning again, right away, and the boys said he wouldn’t promise to go any place where they didn’t let him speak against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. I heard him down here that fall--his first big speech. I hadn’t never had any idee what was in Abraham Lincoln before. He wa’n’t the same man at all. Serious--you wouldn’t believe it, seemed to feel plumb bad about repealin’ the Missouri Compromise, said ’twas wrong, just as wrong as ’twould be to repeal the law against bringing in slaves from Africa. I must say I hadn’t thought of that before. I remember some of the things he said about Douglas’ idee of popular sovereignty, just as well as if ’twas yesterday. “When the white man governs himself,” he said, “that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another, that is more than self-government, that is despotism.” “If the negro is a man, then my ancient faith teaches me that all men are created equal.” “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” And he just lit into slavery that day. “I hate it,” he said. “I hate it because it is a monstrous injustice.” Yes, sir, them’s the very words he used way back there in ’54. “I hate it because it makes the enemies of free institutions call us hypocrites, I hate it because it makes men criticise the Declaration of Independence, and say there ain’t no right principle but self-interest.” More’n one old abolitionist who heard that speech said that they hadn’t no idee how bad slavery was or how wicked the Kansas-Nebraska bill was ’til then.