There was, we are told, a
mischievous twinkle in his eye when he replied that he considered it very
unfair on the part of the Lord, because the southerners drank a good deal
worse whiskey and more of it than the soldiers of the north.
Most of these stories and parables had a flavor of the west and of the
fields where they were collected in the days when, as a lawyer, he
followed the court from one town to another, and spent the nights in talk
around the tavern stove.
When asked one day how he disposed of a caller who had come to him in a
towering rage, he told of the farmer in Illinois who announced one Sunday
to his neighbors that he had gotten rid of a great log in the middle of
his field. They were anxious to know how, since it was too big to haul
out, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn. And the farmer
announced: "I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got rid of
General----. I ploughed around him, but it took me three hours to do it."
This, then, was the lank boatman who came down the river (that was once
the River Colbert) and who, seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New
Orleans, went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them that was a
"continual torment," as he said, and with a vow to hit that institution
hard if ever he had a chance.
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