“That Lincoln of yourn is a great man,” he says after a spell. “He ain’t botherin’ about the Senate--not a mite. He’s tryin’ to make the people of Illinois understand the danger there is in slavery spreadin’ all over the country. He’s a big man, the biggest man I’ve seen in a long time.” Well, that sounded good to me, for that was just about what I’d figured out by that time, that Lincoln was a big man, a bigger man than Stephen A. Douglas. Didn’t seem possible to me it could be so, but the more I went over it in my mind the more certain I felt about it. Yes, sir, I’d figured it out at last what bein’ big was, that it was bein’ right thinkin’ things out straight and then hangin’ on to ’em because they was right. That was bein’ big and that was Abraham Lincoln all through--the whole of him. That wa’n’t Douglas at all. He didn’t care whether he thought right or not, if he got what he was after. There wa’n’t no real truth in him. See what he did in the very first debate up to Ottawa. He started out up there by callin’ Lincoln an abolitionist and sayin’ he wanted a nigger wife, and to prove it read a lot of abolition resolutions which, he said Lincoln had helped git up as far back as ’54. The very next day after that debate, the Chicago _Tribune_ came out and showed that Mr. Lincoln hadn’t ever had anything to do with the resolutions Douglas had read. Yes, sir, them resolutions had come from some measely abolition meetin’ where Mr. Lincoln had never been. Douglas had been tryin’ to play a trick on us. I tell you when that news got out you could ’a’ heard a pin drop among Illinois Democrats. It seemed as if he couldn’t realize how serious we was feelin’ or he wouldn’t try a trick like that. Then he was always draggin’ in things which didn’t have no bearin’ on the case, and takin’ up Lincoln’s time makin’ him answer ’em. One was a-tellin’ how Lincoln had voted against givin’ money to carry on the Mexican War. Now, I know that wa’n’t so, and more’n that it didn’t have anything to do with the question. It made me feel plumb bad to have him goin’ on that way. And that’s the way he kept it up. Always digressin’, never takin’ up a p’int till Lincoln had drove him into a corner, always insistin’ Lincoln wanted a nigger wife. Why, he made so much of that fool lie that there was a lot of people got to thinkin’ mebbe that’s what Lincoln’s idees did mean. There’s a man livin’ here in this town now that’s got a little book Lincoln made for him to show around and to prove he didn’t mean nuthin’ of the kind. Fact was, Douglas never meant to argue it out fair and square. He meant to dodge, to mix us up and keep our minds off Kansas-Nebraska and old Judge Taney, and all the things Lincoln made so much of. I recollect Lincoln said one day that the way Douglas acted reminded him of a cuttle-fish throwin’ out a black ink to color up the water so he could git away from something that was chasin’ him.