In Ottawa, the site of his first debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln made the grand entrance. On this hot, high summer Saturday, 15,000 spectators crowded the wooden sidewalks of Ottawa, converging on the village by canal boat, horseback, wagon, carriage and foot, doubling its population in an afternoon. “The crowd had a holiday air,” a woman remembered half a century later.
“It seemed out of place to me, for those were serious questions that Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Douglas were debating.
The people paid for the gayety of that day in the horrors of the Civil War.” Lincoln would not have the first word — as the incumbent, Douglas got the initial opening speech — but he would have the crowd. Ottawa lay in the Third Congressional District, represented by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, brother of the Alton newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy, whose 1837 lynching at the hands of a pro-slavery mob Lincoln had condemned before the Springfield Lyceum.
By the time Lincoln arrived at the Rock Island Railroad depot on the noon train from Chicago, thousands of Republicans had gathered outside. He was greeted with three cheers, then hustled into a carriage decorated with evergreen boughs and anti-slavery slogans. Slowly, the carriage rolled toward the mansion of Mayor J.
O. Glover, preceded by a marching band and a bunting-draped float on which stood 32 waving girls, one for each state in the Union. Lincoln was being borne toward his destiny, for it was on this day, in this place,.
