One of Lincoln’s stiffest political opponents, John Hill (son of the New Salem merchant Samuel Hill), also praised Lincoln for his remarkable eloquence. “The convincing power of Mr. Lincoln’s plain conversational method of address,” recalled Hill, was “marvelous and almost iresistable, Plain, candid and honest, without the slightest effort at display or oratory.” Lincoln carried his auditors “along to unconscious conviction. The benign expression of his face and his earnest interest in the subject, asserted with such simplicity, secured sympathetic absorbtion. All listened in close attention to the end, and when he had finished there pervaded a momentary solemn silence before his audience realised that it was the end.” Hill described Lincoln as “the planest man I ever heard.” He “was not a speaker but a talker.” Such were his “honesty, candor, and fairness” that it “was scarcely possible for an auditor not to believe every word [he] uttered.” The same was true of conversation. “He left behind him on all occasions, a feeling one can not express of respect and that accompanied by affection for a good man.” Lincoln’s fellow attorney and Whig politician Albert Taylor Bledsoe detected in Lincoln’s speeches “a homely strength, and a rustic beauty of expression, which are more effective than the oratorical periods of an [Edward] Everett or a [George] Bancroft. His simple, terse, plain, direct English, goes right home to the point.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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