Carthage heard Lincoln between famous debates

By Stephen Anderson

Between his last debate with Stephen Douglas and the election that followed, Abraham Lincoln made a campaign stop in Carthage on Oct. 22, 1858.

The site is marked with a metal plaque that is mounted on a boulder in front of the 100-year-old Hancock County Courthouse, where a centennial program will take place on Saturday, Oct. 18 (ISBA Bar News, August, page 21).

That was not Lincoln’s first visit to Carthage, but it was the most auspicious. On April 25, 1839, he lost a criminal case that resulted in the only legal execution in county history.

The client, William Fraim, was charged with a murder that resulted from a drunken brawl. Lincoln’s defense failed, and Fraim was summarily hanged.

An account of Lincoln’s campaign speech in Carthage almost two decades later is published in the summer issue of For the People, the newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

The writer was Joseph Smith III, son of the Mormon prophet who was murdered in the Carthage Jail in June 1844. Smith also attended a campaign speech that Douglas gave 11 days earlier at the old courthouse.

Smith observed Douglas showing “unmistakable signs of intoxication.” He “was unsteady on his feet, and his words were pronounced with difficulty.” The speech ended abruptly when the chair announced that Douglas “was suddenly indisposed.”

At first glimpse of Lincoln on Oct. 22, Smith described him as “anything but prepossessing or reassuring… His eyes were dull, his manner awkward, and his voice sharp.”

But ever the wit, Lincoln stood straight up and poked his head through a canopy covered with boughs. “There he stood towering, like some queer creature whose head was detached from its body!”

Smith quickly lost his sense of pity as Lincoln’s “gestures took on an unstudied grace, his voice lost its harsh and strident accents, and in a few moments his oratory and argument held us spellbound.”

After that, Smith became a believer in Lincoln “with a political conscience more firmly fixed than ever in its opposition to slavery and evils.”