“The people of this city were edified last Saturday evening by a speech from Honorable Abe Lincoln. He apologized very handsomely for appearing before an Iowa audience during a campaign in which he was not interested. He then, with many excuses and a lengthy explanation, as if conscious of the nauseous nature of the black Republican nostrum, announced his intention to speak about the ‘eternal negro,’ to use his own language, and entered into a lengthy and ingenious analysis of the nigger question, impressing upon his hearers that it was the only question to be agitated until finally settled. He carefully avoided going directly to the extreme ground occupied by him in his canvass against Douglas, yet the doctrines which he preached, carried out to their legitimate results, amount to precisely the same thing. He was decidedly opposed to any fusion or coalition of the Republican party with the opposition of the South, and clearly proved the correctness of his ground, in point of policy. They must retain their sectional organization and sectional character, and continue to wage their sectional warfare by slavery agitation; but if the opposition South would accede to their view and adopt their doctrines, he was willing to run for President in 1860, a Southern man with Northern principles, or in other words, with abolition proclivities. His speech was of the character of an exhortation to the Republican party, but was in reality as good a speech as could have been made for the interest of the Democracy. He was listened to with much attention, for his Waterloo defeat by Douglas has magnified him into quite a lion here.” Transcriber’s Notes Old English lettering on the pages preceding the Table of Contents is represented here within =equals signs=. Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations. Running page headers are shown here as Sidenotes, usually positioned just above the paragraph they summarize. When such Sidenotes summarize footnotes, they are positioned above the paragraphs that referenced those footnotes. This is Volume I of a two-volume set. The Index for both volumes is at the end of Volume II, and that volume also is available at Project Gutenberg. Page 196: “drouth” (drought) was printed that way, and in use in the 1800s. Page 206: “5 1-2 o’clock” was printed that way.