BACK THERE IN '58
government, and said that if the white people in Nebraska was good enough to govern themselves, they was good enough to govern niggers, I felt dead sure there wa'n't no other side to it.
What bothered me was the way Mr. Lincoln kept on takin' it. He got so he wa'n't the same, 'peared to be in a brown study all the time. Come in here and set by the stove with the boys and not talk at all. Didn't seem to relish my yarns either like he used to. He started in campaigning again, right away, and the boys said he wouldn't promise to go any place where they didn't let him speak against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. I heard him down here that fall—his first big speech. I hadn't never had any idee what was in Abraham Lincoln before. He wa'n't the same man at all. Serious—you wouldn't believe it, seemed to feel plumb bad about repealin' the Missouri Compromise, said
48
