Mr. Lincoln:—The citizens of De Witt county favorable to your election to the United States Senate have deputed me to offer to you a kind welcome on this occasion; and although it has been your habit to visit our county frequently in the last twenty years, you have never come amongst us when you were an object of such peculiar interest as you are to-day.2 We are proud to recognize you as the chosen standard-bearer in this great contest,— a contest in which are involved the greatest issues, and upon which the American people are now looking with a degree of interest hitherto unparalleled in the history of State politics; a contest in which are struggling the great doctrines upon which this government, for a period of more than half a century, has been administered; a contest in which the long established construction of our Federal Union is involved; a contest which, from its special indorsement, may make the institution of African slavery co-extensive with the limits of our Federal Union, or may bring back the policy of the government to that highway of principle once trod by the immortal Washington, the sagacious Jefferson and the pacific Monroe.3 It is then the great principle now at issue that has brought together these thousands of freemen with which you are surrounded. It is the doctrine as taught by the Fathers of the Republic that now inspires them with such boundless enthusiasm. It is then in the name of the Constitution as it was administered upon the subject of slavery for a period of three quarters of a century, that here upon the free soil of De Witt county, in this the free State of your adoption, that in behalf of freemen I bid you welcome. We are happy then to recognize you as a fit instrument in the hands of a patriotic and Union-loving constituency to effect a noble and wise purpose. And, sir, we have the confidence to believe that when a free people shall have chosen you as their representative in one of the most dignified bodies on earth, your official conduct will be such as that the people who placed you in power shall have no reason to regret their choice, and that no section of the country can in truth say that your considerations of duty are such as that the spirit of the Constitution, as intended by its authors; has not been by you practically applied. We are sanguine in the hope that in this race you will be successful, and that your success will contribute to preserving the blessings of a free government, so that generations yet unborn shall bask in the enjoyment of all the political privileges now possessed by the American people. And although you do not come with the prestige incident to your antagonist, you come with a private character above reproach, and a public career great in all the elements of the statesman and patriot. You come not like him “great in the resources of a misguided spirit, great in desolation like the whirlwind;”4 — your coming inspires this vast auditory with the thought of the poet—

What constitutes a state?
Not high-rais’d[raised] battlements or labor’d[labored] mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities proud with spires and turrets crown’d[crowned];
Not bays and broad-arm’d[armed] ports,
Where, laughing at the storm, proud navies ride;
Not starr’d[starred] and spangled courts,
Where low-brow’d[browed] baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No:—Men, high-minded Men,
With powers as far above dull brutes endued,
in forest, brake, or den,
As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude;
Men, who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.5

Permit me, in conclusion, to say welcome; with my assurance that during your stay you shall be the recipient of our kindness and hospitality.