Encounters
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Lincoln was among the few veterans in the enlarged and reapportioned legislature; of the ninety-one members (thirty-six more than its immediate predecessor) less than one-fourth were incumbents. During the 1836–1837 session, Lincoln became prominent as the leader of Whigs in the House. He regularly squelched Democrats with clever stories. In 1839, a Democratic legislator identified ten colleagues, among them Lincoln, who “take up more time than all the members.” An Assembly colleague, Robert L. Wilson, thought him “a natural debater” who “was always ready and always got right down to the merits of his case, without any nonsense or circumlocution.” As comfortable in the House of Representatives as he was in the houses of New Salem, “he had a quaint and peculiar way, all of his own, of treating a subject, and he frequently startled us by his modes—but he was always right.” To Wilson he “seemed to be a born politician.” The Whigs “followed his lead, but he followed nobody’s lead; he hewed the way for us to follow, and we gladly did so.” He combined mastery of the facts with clear thinking and formidable oratorical skill, yet he “excited no envy or jealousy” because of his unpretentious manner and winning wit. His colleagues readily acknowledged that he was “so much greater than the rest of us that we were glad to abridge our intellectual labors by letting him do the general thinking for the crowd.” Whig Representatives, Wilson said, “would ride while he would walk, but we recognized him as a master in logic; he was poverty itself when I knew him, but still perfectly independent. He would borrow nothing and never ask favors.” (Lincoln seldom asked favors because he believed that “those who receive favors owe a debt of gratitude to the giver and to that extent are obedient and abject slaves.”) To Wilson, Lincoln “seemed to glide along in life without any friction or effort.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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