the force of south-western simile could no further go. But the great
popularity of Reynolds and the adroit management of the Whigs carried
him through successfully. A single fact will show on which side the
people who could read were enlisted. The "whole-hog" party had one
newspaper, the opposition five. Of course it would have been
impossible for Reynolds to poll a respectable vote if his loyalty to
Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes
through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as
strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor
himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the
damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting
an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the
ground that "it would flood the country with Yankees."

It showed some moral courage, and certainly an absence of the
shuffling politician's fair-weather policy, that Lincoln, in his
obscure and penniless youth, at the very beginning of his career, when
he was not embarrassed by antecedents or family connections, and when,
in fact, what little social influence he knew would have led him the
other way, chose to oppose a furiously intolerant majority, and to
take his stand with the party which was doomed to long-continued
defeat in Illinois. The motives which led him to take this decisive
course are not difficult to imagine. The better sort of people in
Sangamon County were Whigs, though the majority were Democrats, and he
preferred through life the better sort to the majority. The papers he
read were the Louisville "Journal" and the "Sangamo Journal," both
Whig. Reading the speeches and debates of the day, he sided with
Webster against Calhoun, and with Clay against anybody. Though his
notions of politics, like those of any ill-educated young man of
twenty-two, must have been rather crude, and not at all sufficient to