Lincoln’s oratory in 1840, like that of other Harrison campaigners, tended to pander to popular taste. In an unusually perceptive commentary on the young Lincoln, John M. Scott, an attorney who eventually became chief justice of the Illinois State Supreme Court, described one of Lincoln’s speeches during that campaign. The young legislator, “already regarded as one of the ablest of the Whig speakers in that campaign,” stood in a wagon to address his audience. There was something “in him that attracted and held public attention,” Scott recalled. “Even then he was the subject of popular regard because of his candid and simple mode of discussing and illustrating political questions.” In 1840, the dominant economic issues “were not such questions as enlisted and engaged his best thoughts—they did not take hold of his great nature and had no tendency to develop it.” Occasionally “he discussed the questions of the time in a logical way, but much time was devoted to telling stories to illustrate some phase of his argument, but more often the telling of these stories was resorted to for the purpose of rendering his opponents ridiculous.” That “was a style of speaking much appreciated at that early day.” In such oratory, Lincoln “had no equals in the state.” A story he told was “not one it would be seemly to publish, but rendered as it was in his inimitable way it contained nothing that was offensive to a refined taste.” Scott noted Lincoln’s gift for telling off-color stories in a way that “they gave no offense even to refined and cultured people.” That day Lincoln’s story was met “with loud bursts of laughter and applause.” It placed “the opposing party and its speakers in a most ludicrous position,” and it “gave him a most favorable hearing for the arguments he later made in support of the measures he was sustaining.” In that period, Lincoln’s mastery of humor was very effective and made him a popular speaker. Acknowledging that it was “not a fair mode of treating an adversary,” Scott explained that “it is a mode of attack greatly relished by popular assemblies” because “most people like to see their opponents discomfited by being made the butt of a well told story.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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