considerable experience in speaking and thinking on his feet. He had
begun his practice in that direction before leaving Indiana, and
continued it everywhere he had gone. Mr. William Butler tells us that
on one occasion, when Lincoln was a farmhand at Island Grove, the
famous circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright, came by, electioneering for
the Legislature, and Lincoln at once engaged in a discussion with him
in the cornfield, in which the great Methodist was equally astonished
at the close reasoning and the uncouth figure of Mr. Brown's
extraordinary hired man. At another time, after one Posey, a
politician in search of office, had made a speech in Macon, John
Hanks, whose admiration of his cousin's oratory was unbounded, said
that "Abe could beat it." He turned a keg on end, and the tall boy
mounted it and made his speech. "The subject was the navigation of the
Sangamon, and Abe beat him to death," says the loyal Hanks. So it was
not with the tremor of a complete novice that the young man took the
stump during the few days left him between his return and the
election.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "My Own Times," p. 291.]

He ran as a Whig. As this has been denied on authority which is
generally trustworthy, it is well enough to insist upon the fact. We
have a memorandum in Mr. Lincoln's own handwriting in which he says he
ran as "an avowed Clay man." In one of the few speeches of his, which,
made at this time, have been remembered and reported, he said: "I am
in favor of a national bank; I am in favor of the internal improvement
system, and of a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and
political principles." Nothing could be more unqualified or outspoken
than this announcement of his adhesion to what was then and for years
afterwards called "the American System" of Henry Clay. Other testimony