Recollection by Henry Clay Whitney, Jonesboro Debate, September 15, 1858

    Source citation
    Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln: With Sketches of Generals Grant, Sherman and McClellan, Judge Davis, Leonard Swett, and Other Contemporaries (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 463-464.
    Type
    Book
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Transcriber
    Adapted by Ben Lyman, Dickinson College
    The following transcript has been adapted from Life on the Circuit with Lincoln: With Sketches of Generals Grant, Sherman and McClellan, Judge Davis, Leonard Swett, and Other Contemporaries (1892).

    The third joint debate came off at Jonesboro' on September 15th. I knew he would be short of friends down there (in Egypt, as it was called) so I went down and when we went to the platform I sat with Lincoln, and was thereby enabled to note an air of deep resolve and quiet determination which would have brought forth fruits mete for repentance to the Little Giant, had he pressed his line of insult, inaugurated at Ottawa: one item of which was the anomalous threat to "bring him to his milk" when he had "trotted him down to Egypt."

    I did not fail to note that Douglas was more discreet in his style than at Ottawa: Lincoln was not the kind of sleeping lion to be woke up—a fact not unknown to Douglas.

    How to Cite This Page: "Recollection by Henry Clay Whitney, Jonesboro Debate, September 15, 1858," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/27528.