the Thirtieth, and Lincoln took his seat in it December 6, 1847. He was very much at home there, for he had then been repeatedly a member of the State Legislature, had "stumped" Illinois from one end to the other, had made a great many public speeches, had met all the leading men of that region, and had been accustomed to hold his own in debate. Add to all this the fact that he had, ever since boyhood, been a diligent, almost hungry, student of political affairs, and had heard them discussed in public places, or had read in the newspapers, and we shall see that he was no tyro in affairs that were likely to come before Congress. He was familiar with all the great questions, had debated them before the people, and had so studied the history of his country that he knew all that had happened to lead up to the crisis in which the republic then found itself-with a foreign war on its hands and a new State in the Union, the admission of which a great many public men, in and out of Congress, regarded as a misfortune to the republic. James K. Polk was President of the United States, and, disappointed by a failure to dispose of the Mexican question before he took office, his messages to Congress were designed to show that the war with Mexico was a just one, and that he had been right in all that he had done to make that war inevitable.

Lincoln's acute mind saw the inconsistency of the President's position, and, in order to bring from President Polk, if possible, a statement of the facts on which he had pretended to base his messages, Lincoln, as soon as he had fairly become used to his

seat, introduced a series of resolutions asking the President for information. These resolutions were prefaced by a clear statement of the situation, as it appeared to him, together with sundry extracts from the President's messages of that year and the year next preceding. The aim of these resolutions will be seen by quoting the first three, as follows:

"That the President of the United States be respectfully requested to inform this house:

"First. Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican revolution.

"Second. Whether this spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary government of Mexico.

"Third. Whether that spot is or is not within a settlement of people, which settlement has existed ever since long before the Texas revolution and until its inhabitants fled before the approach of the United States army."

The questions were never answered. No answer was probably expected. It was seen that if the President or the President's friends should undertake to reply, and admit the real facts, the position taken by Mr. Polk, and those who defended the war, would be surrendered. So, not being able to make answer to the only Whig representative from Illinois, the tall backwoods lawyer, they contented themselves with giving him a nickname. As he had used the word "spot" several times in the resolutions and in the speech that followed, he was known for a

The speech,

time, at least, as "Spot Lincoln.' which was delivered in the succeeding January, was a masterly one, reviewing the causes of the Mexican War and severely arraigning the administration for its persistence in the matter of the annexation of Texas, and thus involving the country in a bloody and causeless fight with Mexico.

It is well to bear in mind that there were many eminent men in Congress in those days. In the Senate were Daniel Webster, Lewis Cass, John A. Dix, Thomas H. Benton, John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Stephen Arnold Douglas, and other wellknown statesmen. In the House of Representatives were such men as ex-President John Quincy Adams, Caleb B. Smith, afterwards a member of Lincoln's cabinet, John G. Palfrey, Robert C. Winthrop, Andrew Johnson, elected Vice-President of the United States when Lincoln was chosen for his second term; Alexander H. Stephens, afterwards Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy; Robert Toombs, the Southern slaveholder who promised to have his slaves mustered to roll-call on Bunker Hill; Howell Cobb, afterwards a general in the rebel army, and many others famous in the stormy times then making ready in the distance. In this illustrious company of legislators, Lincoln was recognized as a man of marked ability. Speaking of him, long afterwards, Alexander H. Stephens said:

"He always attracted and riveted the attention of the House when he spoke. His manner of speech, as well as thought, was original. He had no model. He was a man

of strong convictions and what Carlyle would have called an earnest man. He abounded in anecdote. He illustrated everything he was talking about with an anecdote, always exceedingly apt and pointed; and socially he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”

We see that many of the traits of the pioneer boy still stuck to the mature man, now in Congress. Lincoln took part in the debates of the House rather more frequently than most new members did then, or do in these later days. Some of his speeches, to be found in the printed record of Congress, show characteristic touches of humor. For example, speaking of the attempt to make a military hero of General Lewis Cass, who was to be the next Democratic candidate for President, and who was said to have been an important figure in a small fight on the Canadian border, Lincoln said, with rough sarcasm:

"He invaded Canada without resistance, and he outvaded without pursuit." "He was volunteer aid to General Harrison on the day of the battle of the Thames, and as you said, in 1840, that Harrison was picking whortleberries, two miles off, while the battle was fought, I suppose it is a just conclusion with you to say that Cass was aiding Harrison to pick whortleberries."

It is to be noticed that Lincoln, while he disapproved of the Mexican War, always voted to reward the bravery of the soldiers who fought the battles and who were not in any way responsible for the war. Later, when he and Douglas were holding a political discussion, Douglas reproached Lincoln

with being an enemy of his country during the Mexican War. Lincoln replied: "I was an old Whig, and when the Democratic party tried to get me to vote that the war had been righteously begun by the President, I would not do it. But when they asked for money, or land warrants, or anything to pay the soldiers, I gave the same vote that Douglas did." This was true, but it must be admitted that Whig politicians who disapproved of the war, and were compelled by public opinion to vote for war supplies, had a hard time of it. If this was true of the Whigs, Lincoln showed, with great force and caustic scorn, that the Democratic President was also in great perplexity. Speaking of the President's struggles to set himself right, when he knew that he was wrong, Lincoln said:

"He knows not where he is." "All this shows that the President is by no means satisfied with his positions. First, he takes up one, and, in attempting to argue us into it, he argues himself out of it. Then he seizes another, and goes through the same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before cast off. His mind, tasked beyond its powers, is running hither and thither, like some tortured thing on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease."

This speech was made in the House of Representatives after Taylor had been nominated at Philadelphia by the Whigs in 1848. Clay had been supported in that convention as a candidate more fit