A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 11
Let No One Be Deceived 1852–56

OUR REPUBLICAN ROBE IS SOILED, AND TRAILED IN THE DUST LET US REPURIFY IT LET US TURN AND WASH IT WHITE, IN THE SPIRIT, IF NOT THE BLOOD, OF THE REVOLUTION.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854

WE WERE THUNDERSTRUCK AND STUNNED; AND WE REELED AND FELL IN utter confusion.” Abraham Lincoln spoke these words in one of his first responses to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. He found himself quickly caught up in the midst of a tempest, and his words revealed his keen awareness that he was not prepared for the political task before him. Yet, he would discover in the months ahead how to speak with new definition and clarity about the meaning of the promise of America in the national debate about slavery. The ways in which Lincoln responded to this storm would mark a significant turning point in his life.
ON JANUARY 4, 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the powerful Committee on Territories, brought to the Senate a bill to set up a government in the vast Nebraska Territory. The urgency grew from mounting pressure to organize this territory in the center of the old Louisiana Purchase. President Jefferson’s acquisition from France in 1803 of more than one million square miles had expanded the area of the United States all the way from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States consisted of seventeen states—nine free and eight slave—of almost equal population.
Political infighting over the organization of the sizable Nebraska Territory had broken out in earlier Congresses, and four previous bills had foundered over disagreements about the extension of slavery. Doug las now offered what he called a “compromise” measure, arguing that local control, what he called a long-held American “sacred” value, would finally mitigate the issue of slavery. In its final form the act provided for not one but two new territories, Nebraska and Kansas. The bill stated that “all questions pertaining to slavery in the territories were to be left to the decision of the people residing therein.” The intent of Douglas’s bill was to transfer the power to decide whether or not slavery would be permitted from Congress to the people in the territory.
The storm began the moment the Kansas-Nebraska Act was introduced. Salmon P. Chase, elected to the Senate from Ohio in 1849 by a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats, was chosen point man for the counterattack. Chase would be ably assisted by Charles Sumner, the new senator from Massachusetts, also elected by Free Soilers and Democrats. The tall, handsome Chase questioned Douglas’s interpretation of American history and declared that the leaders of the revolutionary generation had abhorred slavery, had tolerated it as the price of gaining approval for the Constitution, and, by restricting its future growth, had expected it to die out by the second or third generation of the new nation. In the course of his remarks, Chase charged that the Illinois senator had “out Southernized the South.”
Douglas was surprised and angered by the intensity of the criticisms. A dramatic moment occurred when Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts brought to the Senate a 250-foot-long memorial against the bill signed by 3,050 New England ministers of various denominations. Douglas was furious at what he described as religious leaders inappropriately meddling in politics.
On March 2, 1854, the Senate began a final debate on the bill. Everyone wanted to speak, bickering ensued, and insults were exchanged. On March 3, exhaustion set in and liquor broke out. At dusk, the candles in the great chamber were lit so that the debate could continue. Douglas finally began his summation at eleven-thirty in the evening with the galleries still packed. He rested his case in his belief that popular sovereignty would in the long run “destroy all sectional parties and sectional agitations.” After a nonstop session of more than seventeen hours, at five o’clock in the morning on March 4, the Senate passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act by a vote of 37 to 14. The size of the majority belied the tensions within both the Democratic and Whig parties.


The bill faced greater opposition in the House. With the bill bottled up in committee, Lincoln’s friend from the Thirtieth Congress, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, played an experienced parliamentary hand to bring it to the floor for a vote. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was approved by the House on May 22, 1854, in a much tighter vote, 113 to 110. President Franklin Pierce, who lined up with Douglas’s intentions, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 30. The fight in Congress had been won, but the real battle was about to begin.
The debate over and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act dramatically changed the political landscape of the country. The carefully constructed political compromises of 1820 and 1850 had been overturned; the fury of the antislavery advocates was intensified; but the legislative action fell short of mollifying many in the South. The Whig Party, which had elected a president only six years earlier, was now demoralized and in disarray; it struggled to respond. The Democratic Party, which Douglas hoped to bring together, suffered dissension between Northern and Southern members. American religious leaders, not united in their response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, came together in pulpits and press to exhort their constituencies to raise their voices in protest. An “anti-Nebraska” movement grew quickly, enlisting disparate groups that cut across party lines.
With Clay, Calhoun, and Webster no longer present, new, younger leaders entered the political stage. The forty-year-old Douglas, serving in his second term in the Senate and ambitious to move to center stage, positioned himself as a leading actor in an unfolding national drama. Far offstage, Abraham Lincoln, at age forty-four, five years removed from his single term in Congress and traveling the dusty back roads of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, emerged from political exile to speak with new power in response to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the months of 1854 and beyond, Lincoln and Douglas would find themselves on a collision course.
AS THE BILL MOVED forward through Congress in the winter and spring of 1854, Lincoln read reports of the debate in the Congressional Globe. Herndon had long made it his business to show Lincoln important speeches, newspaper reports, and editorials about national issues. Three weeks after Douglas introduced his bill, Lincoln read in the National Era “An Appeal of Independent Democrats” over the names of six congressional leaders, including Senators Chase and Sumner, plus his friend from the Thirtieth Congress Joshua Giddings of Ohio. The “Appeal” was filled with inflammatory language. “We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
The fact that Lincoln failed to speak out was not surprising. He did not hold political office, nor was he a candidate for office. He was, however, extremely busy with his general law practice. In January and February, he began work on an appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court of his first large case for the Illinois Central Railroad, Illinois Central v. McLean County. He was continuously involved in court cases until the Sangamon Circuit Court adjourned in Springfield on June 15, 1854. And he continued to practice his regular intellectual discipline. His notes from the 1850s include reflections on law, government, slavery, sectionalism, Stephen A. Douglas, and the formation of the Republican Party.
In the early months of 1854, the anti-Nebraska movement accelerated the disintegration of the Whigs, but Lincoln was, if anything, loyal. He remained faithful to the party of Clay and was not ready to abandon the Whig heritage or its future.


The artist places the blame on the Democrats for the violence against Free Staters in Kansas in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

And he did not know for sure which way the political winds were blowing. In the 1850s, the nation experienced its largest reordering of political parties in its history. The Liberty Party, abolitionists energized by an evangelical perfectionist theology, had experienced some success in the early 1840s, especially in New York, but its base was too radical and its ideology too focused to allow it to become a national party. The Free Soil Party showed promise of broader appeal in 1848, enticing both Whigs and Democrats in New England, New York, and across the northern tiers of the Midwestern states to join its ranks, but it had yet to achieve a wider appeal. Both parties developed from a groundswell of Northern antislavery and sectional sentiment.
In these same years, Lincoln was discouraged by the nativism sweeping the country. Immigration had surged in the 1840s, bringing newcomers fleeing revolutions in continental Europe and famine in Ireland. In response, an anti-immigration movement had sprung up. Various secret societies coalesced in the early 1850s into the American Party, popularly known as Know-Nothings, because members, when asked about their organization, steadfastly declared their ignorance of the party. The largest group of immigrants—the Irish—as well as many Germans, were Catholic and became the target of Protestant attacks. Many Americans viewed Catholic obedience to a conservative pope as a threat to the liberal American belief in religious liberty. Paradoxically, Know-Nothings and other nativist groups often attracted the same voters who were for temperance, hostile to the hard-drinking Irish Catholics, and against slavery. This appeal to nationalism united Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers into a Know-Nothing movement that experienced some spectacular election victories in 1854 and 1855. The New York Herald even predicted the Know-Nothings would win the presidency in 1856.
Lincoln became heartsick as he watched the Know-Nothings make inroads into the Whig Party. He wrote to Owen Lovejoy, abolitionist minister of the Congregational church in Princeton, Illinois, whose brother, Elijah, had been killed in 1837 for defending his printing press in Alton, “I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.” He was more adamant in a letter to his old friend Joshua Speed. “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” Lincoln then addressed the dizzying events unfolding across the nation.


Lincoln became dismayed by the nativist movement’s inroads into the Whig Party in the 1850s. “The Know Nothing Citizen” depicts a fair-haired young man meant to be the embodiment of the native-born citizen.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal. ” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
LINCOLN WATCHED FROM A DISTANCE as another new party struggled to be born. Starting in 1852, a moderate antislavery movement began to attract disgruntled Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers. If the problem of slavery became a primary catalyst for this new movement, its first leaders also expressed long-held economic beliefs about protective tariffs, internal improvements, and the use of public lands in the West. The urgency to act now grew from their sense that their ideas were being blocked by a Southern oligarchy that for too long had exercised too much power in Washington. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to local meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as in Vermont, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. This new movement was called by different names, but the name “Republican”—probably first used in Ripon, Wisconsin, in February 1854—quickly became its calling card. Concerned about the future, these early Republican leaders saw themselves as heirs to the old Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans of the past.
IN 1854 OR 1855, Lincoln wrote two notes on slavery.
The first, perhaps referring to George Fitzhugh’s Sociology of Slavery, stated, “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.” Fitzhugh, a Virginia lawyer and social theorist, had argued in his 1854 book that the slave was “but a grown up child” who needed the protections provided by Southern society, whereas free labor in the North could be easily exploited.
Lincoln began his second note with a philosophical question. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? … You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker?” He tried out the same argument with the characteristics of “intellectual superiority” and “interest.” In each case, his response is, be careful, “you are to be slave to the first man you meet,” with a color, intellect, or interest superior to yours. This fragment is a rare glimpse of a private Lincoln puzzling out the most public problem of the day.
Lincoln’s reading, contemplation, and writing was his means not simply to acquire more knowledge or to prepare for a future speech, but to forge his moral character. Always an astute observer of the character of others, he was keenly aware of his own moral development. Lincoln attempted to clarify his ethical identity even as he prepared to speak with new clarity about the moral issues facing the nation.
Many of the ideas in these notes, and sometimes the exact language, would later find their way into his speeches. Although remembered as a grand spontaneous speaker, Lincoln increasingly preferred careful preparation before making a speech.
He also listened. On a warm July day in 1854, Cassius M. Clay, an antislavery editor from Kentucky, lectured in Springfield as part of his tour of Illinois. Denied the use of the rotunda of the statehouse because of his abolitionist views, Clay spoke in a grove of trees at the edge of town. Lincoln was present, “whittling sticks as he lay on the turf.”
Clay aimed his rhetorical guns at Douglas and his Springfield mouthpiece, the Illinois State Register, edited by Douglas defender Charles H. Lamphier. Clay, born the son of a large Kentucky slaveholder, was a cousin of Henry Clay, Lincoln’s political hero. As a student at Yale, young Cassius became impressed with the dynamism of New England’s free white labor economy. On his return to Kentucky, he saw with fresh eyes the impoverishment of his own region, which he attributed to its reliance on black slave labor. The way that Clay connected free men with free labor struck a responsive chord in Lincoln.
Clay centered his remarks in Springfield on fidelity to the Declaration of Independence as the key to the present debate on slavery. “The Declaration of Independence asserted an immortal truth. It declared political equality as to personal, civil, and religious rights.” When he turned his firepower on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Clay took aim at the economic impact on the new states. “As men of commerce, mere men of the world, conscious that slavery leads back to barbarism, we cannot look with indifference upon the conversion of this vast region to slavery.” Lincoln, imbued with a belief in everyone’s right to rise, was critical of slavery for denying that right.
LINCOLN FINALLY SPOKE out in late August 1854, three months after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He spoke in response to a request from Richard Yates to assist in his campaign for reelection to Congress in Lincoln’s home district. Yates was an early opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, condemning it in March on the floor of the House of Representatives. On Friday, August 25, Lincoln traveled to Yates’s home in Jacksonville and stayed overnight; the two traveled together to the Scott County Whig Convention in Winchester. Lincoln’s speech focused on “the great wrong and injustice of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory.” The local newspaper believed Lincoln offered “a masterful effort … equal to any upon the same subject in Congress.”
On September 12, 1854, Lincoln addressed a German anti-Nebraska gathering in Bloomington, Illinois. The German immigrants in Illinois, numbering more than thirty thousand by 1850, had been moving away from their initial support for the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. In a season of increasingly incendiary rhetoric, Lincoln addressed the German audience in a decidedly different tone. He was inclusive rather than abusive. “He first declared that the Southern slaveholders were neither better, nor worse than we of the North,” reported the Bloomington Pantagraph. He further stated, “If we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do; and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do. We never ought to lose sight of this fact in discussing the subject.” Lincoln, who in his early political career had attacked opponents without mercy, began his remarks with a plea for understanding for the people of the South, who others just now joining the anti-Nebraska coalition delighted in vilifying.
Lincoln’s speech was more a history lesson than a harangue. He recounted the story of the development of the Mississippi River valley after it was acquired from the French. He invoked the name and precedent of Thomas Jefferson, whom Lincoln identified as a Southerner—a Virginian—who had declared that “slavery should never be introduced into” the territories. Lincoln appealed to the precedent of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which declared that for all time the territories north of the 36°30’ latitude line, the southern boundary of Missouri, “should be free.”
IN THE 1850S, STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS was becoming one of the most visible national politicians. The Little Giant, small in stature, wielded a mighty hammer with his potent words. Douglas’s friends and critics puzzled over how such an astute politician could so misread the signs on the Nebraska horizon. Did he not understand that his actions would raise a storm of protest? Personal motives are exceedingly complex, and Douglas acted from an assortment of them. He started with a belief in local self-government. Douglas also had a desire to help the West grow. He wanted to damp down the extremists, both in the North and South, on the slavery issue. He hoped his actions could bring the Democratic Party together. Last—some would say first—Douglas was a man with an enormous political ambition.
Whoever dared challenge Douglas would inevitably create a large space for himself. Beginning in late 1854, Lincoln stepped into that space; he would challenge Douglas again and again in the coming months and years.
When Congress adjourned on August 7, 1854, Douglas hurried home to Illinois to defend both his bill and his reputation. Some friends urged him to stay away. He joked that he could have journeyed to Illinois by the light of the burning effigies of himself.
On September 1, 1854, Douglas prepared to speak in Chicago. In the early evening, the bells of local churches began a steady funeral dirge to sound their disapproval. More than eight thousand people crammed into Market Square on a sultry summer evening, with hundreds more sitting in the windows and on the rooftops of adjoining buildings. As the Little Giant began to speak, the audience greeted him with an eerie silence. Before long, his words were met by catcalls and hisses. Shaking his fists, his face flushed with anger, he accused the crowd of being a mob. After suffering two hours of alternating taunts and silence, he gave up and stomped off the platform.
Determined to make his case, Douglas set out on a statewide speaking tour trailed by newspaper reporters, and always met by a variety of anti-Nebraska speakers eager to rebut his remarks. Douglas’s announced purpose was to educate the public about the true meaning of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Learning from the Chicago experience, he attempted to restrain his temper, but he could not restrain himself from shouting epithets—“Abolitionists,” “Black Republicans,” and “Nigger-lovers”—as the crowds grew hostile.
When Douglas arrived in Bloomington on September 26, 1854, Lincoln was waiting. He was eager to bring his months of solitary reading and preparation, and his weeks of honing his speeches, into an engagement with the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Illinois State Register groused that Lincoln “had been nosing for weeks in the State Library pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments.” Bloomington resident Jesse W. Fell, a friend of Lincoln’s, proposed that Douglas join Lincoln in a debate, but Douglas refused, replying that this was his meeting. Douglas spoke in the afternoon at the courthouse. As he concluded, the crowd called out, “Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.” Although present, Lincoln declined to respond at that moment, instead inviting the crowd to return to hear him speak in the evening.
A few hours later, Lincoln responded to Douglas’s characterization of the new party as “Black Republicans,” dismissing this remark as a “pander to prejudice.” Lincoln asked the audience to compare the old Douglas of 1849 with the new Douglas of 1854. The old Douglas had spoken “in language much finer and more eloquent than” Lincoln had about the Missouri Compromise. “This Compromise had become canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand should attempt to disturb.” Lincoln then asked, “Who was it that uttered this sentiment? What ‘Black Republican’?” As the crowd roared in laughter, a voice cried out: “Douglas.” Lincoln laid out in elaborate detail the “sophistry” by which the Missouri Compromise had been abandoned in order to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln had done his historical detective work. He carried with him clippings of Douglas’s speeches. His speech at Bloomington sparkled with wisdom and wit.
ONE WEEK LATER, both Lincoln and Douglas attended the opening of the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Douglas spoke outdoors on October 3, 1854, and for a second time he turned down an invitation to appear on the same platform with Lincoln. When heavy rains swamped the fairgrounds, Douglas spoke in the hall of the House of Representatives. While Douglas made his address, Lincoln listened in the lobby, pacing back and forth. With the speech over and the crowd leaving the hall, Lincoln stood on the stairway announcing that he would answer Douglas the next day.
The next afternoon, Lincoln appeared at two o’clock in the Hall of Representatives, which was crowded to overflowing on a muggy afternoon. Lincoln, dressed only in shirt sleeves and ill-fitting pants, invited Douglas, in his usual formal attire, to sit directly in front of him in the first row.
Horace White, a twenty-year-old correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, later wrote that Lincoln spoke that day with “a thin, high-pitched falsetto voice of much carrying power, that could be heard a long distance in spite of the hustle and bustle of the crowd … [with] the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native state, Kentucky.”
Lincoln’s speech at Springfield bore the marks of an orator who had revised and refined a basic speech that he had given for more than a month. In the highly charged atmosphere he began with conciliation. “I do not propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men; but rather to strictly confine myself to the naked merits of the question.” As for slavery, he made it clear that throughout his speech he intended to “MAKEand KEEP the distinction between the EXISTING institution, and the EXTENSION of it.” Lincoln offered “a clear understanding” of the logic and meaning of the Missouri Compromise by again focusing on Jefferson, whom he called “the most distinguished politician of our history.” He took pains to point out that Jefferson, who opposed the extension of slavery in the legislation of the Northwest Ordinance, was himself a slaveholder.
At the heart of the speech Lincoln took up Douglas’s “sacred right of self-government.” Douglas had argued that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was not about slavery, going so far as to say that he was “indifferent” about slavery. At this point in his speech, Lincoln’s historical narrative suddenly became an ethical indictment.
This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.
Lincoln asked his audience to consider what “popular sovereignty” would become at the end of the day. This line of thinking, Lincoln said, “forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but selfinterest.”
In this speech, and his others in 1854, Lincoln developed an alternating rhythm of conciliation and challenge. Having exercised his moral indignation over the slavery he hated, he quickly returned to empathy for the people of the South. He began with a bow to the past. “When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact.” He then moved from past to present. “When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying.” Finally, he personalized the problem by putting the onus on himself, and by implication, his audience, when he declared, “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” With these generous words, he identified with not only the South, but many in the central Illinois audience he was attempting to persuade.
Lincoln, who delighted in rhetorical contrasts, then quoted Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, “ ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ ” and told his audience, “At the hazard of being thought one of the fools … I rush in, I take the bull by the horns.” He was at his best in winsomely combining high and low culture, often through self-deprecation.
Lincoln focused his attention on the “great argument” for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the right of self-government. He set about to unmask the doctrine, but first gave it its due. “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted.” Why not? For Lincoln, it was a prior belief that needed to be settled: “It all depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man.” His voice rising in intensity and volume, he declared: “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”
What was the answer? Lincoln, appealing to what he called his “ancient faith,” declared, “Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.” He believed America was witnessing a march backward from the moral values of the Declaration of Independence.
Then he employed biblical imagery to ressurect the truth of the Declaration of Independence. He issued a call for repentance in the highly evocative, apocalyptic imagery of the book of Revelation where, in the context of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, John the Elder described how the robes of the Christian martyrs had been washed and made white, the symbol for purity. “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust,” Lincoln said. “Let us repurify it. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ ” Just as the writer of the book of Revelation called people to return to their first faith, Lincoln called for a return to the first faith of the founders. “Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices and policy, which harmonize with it.”
For Lincoln’s audiences, the meaning of his argument would not necessarily have been understood. Before 1854, Lincoln had appealed to the Declaration of Independence only twice in his public remarks, first in the speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838, and then in his eulogy for Henry Clay. Starting in 1854, Lincoln would reach back behind the Constitution to invoke the Declaration again and again.
For the revolutionary generation, the Declaration of Independence was primarily about the present act of separation from Great Britain. Their emphasis was not so much on the introduction,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
as the conclusion,
That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.
For the first fifteen years after 1776, the Declaration languished in neglect. The framers of the Constitution barely mentioned it, either in substance or language, in their deliberations.
It reentered the national dialogue when the new Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson challenged the Federalists for office in the first years of the nineteenth century. The Federalists, with no love for Jefferson, focused their patriotic national celebrations not on July 4 but on February 22, the birthday of George Washington.
Lincoln grew up attending Fourth of July celebrations where the entire Declaration would be read. Yet, by the 1840s, many of Lincoln’s fellow Whigs interpreted the Declaration and the Revolution as not “the creation of something new,” but rather a recognition of a reality that had already been realized in the earlier colonial experience. Thus, Rufus Choate, Massachusetts conservative Whig politician, declared in 1834, “The Declaration of Independence, the succeeding conduct of the war, the establishment of our local and general governments” were not new developments but simply “effects, fruits, outward manifestations!” For many Whigs, the Declaration became noteworthy chiefly as a historical signpost. This view, as Lincoln well understood, defused the Declaration as an impetus for reform in mid-nineteenth-century American life.
As the debate over slavery escalated, Southerners also weighed in on the meaning of the Declaration. In a June 27, 1848, Senate debate over how Oregon should be organized, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina argued that government meddling with slavery was embedded in the “false and dangerous assumption” that “all men are created equal.” Calhoun stated that this idea had been “inserted in the Declaration of Independence without any necessity” to the main purpose of separation from Great Britain. Furthermore, he argued that the Declaration’s contention was “a hypothetical truism” about human equality in the state of nature, drawn from the writings of John Locke and Algernon Sidney, but in the present political state the idea that “all men are created equal” was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.”
In his speech at Springfield, Lincoln cut through the political, social, and economic arguments about slavery to expose the moral issue at stake. His intellectual imagination shone in his use of the Declaration of Independence as the centerpiece of his argument.
The next day, Lincoln wrote out a summary of the speech for the Illinois State Journal. Herndon wrote a Journal editorial on the speech, stating, “The anti-Nebraska speech of Mr. Lincoln was the profoundest in our opinion that he has made in his whole life.” Twelve days later, Lincoln offered essentially the same speech in Peoria. This time he wrote out the entire speech for publication, and thus it became known as the Peoria speech, which, distributed as an 1854 campaign document, began to spread the word about Lincoln beyond Illinois.
ON OCTOBER 4, 1854, the same day that Lincoln spoke at the state fair, two Congregational ministers, Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding, attempted to gather a group in Springfield with the intention of starting a Republican state party. Melding their evangelical theology to abolitionist practice, they wished to draw all free-soil groups together. Wanting to hear Lincoln speak, they postponed their meeting. When they met the next day, Lincoln, although invited, did not attend. According to Herndon, who was empathetic with the radical Republican ideals but knew his partner was not, he counseled Lincoln to get out of town, “under the pretense of having business in Tazewell County.”
With or without Lincoln’s presence, Lovejoy and Codding were so impressed with his speech two days before that they hoped to recruit him for the new party’s leadership. In their enthusiasm, they placed Lincoln’s name on a new state committee without his approval.
This action was one of what would become a growing number of attempts in the 1850s to define Lincoln even as he was struggling to define himself. One reason that Lincoln got on so well with Herndon was that he knew that his junior partner, who held more radical views on slavery than did Lincoln, would not attempt to impose his views or misrepresent Lincoln’s opinions. This could not be said for other friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances, who not only sought to define Lincoln but also co-opt him for their cause.
When Lincoln discovered a few weeks later what Lovejoy and Codding had done, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Codding. “I have been perplexed to understand why my name was placed on that committee. I was not consulted on the subject; nor was I apprized of the appointment.” He quickly added, “My opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as any member of the Republican party.”
Why was he not willing to join? First, Lincoln continued to hope for the rejuvenation of the Whig Party. Second, he was concerned that the Republicans seemed to be a narrow party of extreme abolitionists rather than a broad party of antislavery men. Indeed, Lovejoy and Codding’s meeting in Springfield had advocated the immediate abolition of slavery across the nation and the repeal of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Because of the convention’s radical stance, the Illinois Journal, which allied itself with Lincoln, discouraged the forming of a Republican Party in Illinois. Finally, as Lincoln began to consider running for political office again, he wondered if the emergent Republican Party would have staying power. Lovejoy and Codding had met with only a few dozen people in Springfield and had failed to persuade other prominent Whigs to join, and thus a Republican Party in Illinois never got off the ground in 1854.
WHEN LINCOLN REEMERGED in politics in the congressional elections of 1854, he said that “he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reelection of Hon Richard Yates to congress.” But things were moving quickly. As anti-Nebraska men sought to pack the state legislature, they approached Lincoln about running. A group of Know-Nothings also informed him that their party had nominated him—secretly—for the legislature. On September 3, Dr. William Jayne, Lincoln’s family physician, placed an announcement of the candidacy of Lincoln and Logan for the state legislature in the Illinois State Journal. The surprise announcement angered Mary Lincoln, who marched down to the offices of the newspaper and demanded that the editor take the announcement out. The next day, Dr. Jayne called on Lincoln to make his case in person. Years later, Jayne remembered Lincoln’s response. Deeply upset, Lincoln exclaimed, “No—I can’t. You don’t know all. I say you don’t begin to know one-half and that’s enough.”
What didn’t Jayne know? The state legislature may have seemed to Lincoln a step backward after having served in the House of Representatives. Lincoln never explained his reservations, but he quickly changed his mind. He announced his candidacy as a Whig for the state legislature, believing it could help Yates in his tight race for Congress and, at the same time, strengthen the Whigs in the legislature. The 1854 elections confirmed the power of the anti-Nebraska movement in Illinois. On election day Lincoln received the highest number of votes of any candidate in Sangamon County.
At some point during this period, Lincoln set his sights on a higher goal. In the closing weeks of the campaign for the state legislature, he started speaking beyond his district, traveling as far as Chicago, an indication that he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate. In one speech in Chicago, in addition to his usual blasts at Douglas, he took aim at a recent detractor of the Declaration of Independence, Senator John Pet-tit, a Democrat from Indiana, who had spoken in favor of expanding slavery into Kansas. In 1853, on the Senate floor, Pettit said that the Declaration’s decree that “all men are created equal” was not a “self-evident truth” but instead “is nothing more to me than a self-evident lie.” Lincoln now asked, “What would have happened if he had said it in old Independence Hall? The door-keeper would have taken him by the throat and stopped his rascally breath awhile, and then have hurled him into the street.”
James Shields, Lincoln’s old dueling foe, had been elected to the Senate in 1849. At the time, all U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures. Everyone agreed that Shields could be defeated by an anti-Nebraska candidate in the election of 1855. Lincoln’s appetite for public office, stimulated by the responses to his anti-Nebraska speeches, became whetted once again.
But immediately after his election to the legislature, Lincoln made an unsettling discovery. He learned that the state constitution mandated that the legislature could not elect one of its own members as senator. By winning one election, he made himself ineligible for a second election. On November 25, 1854, after more than two weeks of deliberations, Lincoln declined his recently won seat in the legislature.
Lincoln’s withdrawal did not sit well. Some among the Whigs, the anti-Nebraska coalition, and the Know-Nothings felt betrayed. A number believed that Lincoln was an opportunist putting personal ambition ahead of both cause and party.
As Lincoln began his campaign for the U.S. Senate, he displayed his resourcefulness as a politician. In the space of five days in November, he wrote numerous letters to friends all over the state asking them for their support. It was time to call in the chits he had earned in both his legal and political careers. With Charles Hoyt, prominent merchant in Aurora, the bond was legal. Lincoln had represented Hoyt in a lengthy lawsuit in Chicago over the patent for a water wheel in 1850. Four years later, Lincoln wrote to ask for his political support. For others, it was primarily political. Lincoln asked Joseph Gillespie, a political colleague from southern Illinois, whether he intended to make a run and told him, “I do not ask you to yield to me.” Lincoln also wrote to editors, such as Hugh Lemaster, editor of the Fulton Republican at Lewistown. In each letter, Lincoln thanked his correspondents for their support, and concluded by requesting “the names, post-offices, and ‘political position’ of members round about you.” He included a copy of his Peoria speech in each letter.
As Lincoln surveyed his prospects, he understood he had much work to do. In order to win election he would need to gain the votes of some anti-Nebraska Democrats. The majority of Democrats, in revolt against Douglas, were cozying up to the well-liked governor Joel A. Matteson. An alternative was Lyman Trumbull, a former Illinois secretary of state and Supreme Court justice, who had just been elected to Congress from the Eighth District. Trumbull’s wife, the former Julia Jayne, was Mary Lincoln’s close friend. The regular Democrats despised Trumbull because of his anti-Nebraska stance, but he was attracting the interest of independent Democrats who had broken ranks with Douglas, and yet would never vote for an old-line Whig.
Lincoln stepped up his efforts in December, bringing in old friends and colleagues to help. Judge David Davis wrote letters and Leonard Swett traveled the state to line up elected officials for Lincoln. Responses to Lincoln’s November letters were encouraging. Charles Hoyt promised his support: “It will give me pleasure to do what I can for your appointment to the Sennet.” Hugh Lemaster responded, “We want some one that can stand right up to the little Giant (excuse me) it takes a great Blackguard (you know) to do that—and thou art (excuse again) the man.”


Abraham Lincoln ran against Lyman Trumbull, an anti-Nebraska Democrat, for a U.S. Senate seat in 1854–55.

Lincoln made a special effort to reach out to Elihu B. Washburne. A Galena attorney and former Whig, Washburne was one of the first Republicans elected to Congress. On December 11, 1854, Lincoln wrote that he was “a total stranger” to members of Washburne’s northern district and asked, “Could you not drop some of them a line?” On December 14, Lincoln wrote again, complaining that “my most intimate friends” in Chicago “do not answer my letters,” and asking Washburne to contact both Republicans and Democrats. On December 19, after hearing concerns about whether he would represent the rapidly growing northern part of the state, Lincoln assured Washburne he would represent the whole state.
When the legislature assembled in Springfield on January 1, 1855, Lincoln wrote the names of all one hundred members of the Senate and House on seven pages of lined paper. After each name he placed a “W” for Whig, “D” for Democrat, or “A.N.D.” for Anti-Nebraska Democrat. He wrote a number of copies of his list and sent them to some of his key contacts across the state. Davis, Swett, and several others came to Springfield to help. On January 6, Lincoln sent a detailed analysis to Washburne of his assessment of where things stood. He was cautiously optimistic. “I cannot doubt but I have more committals than any other one man.”
After delays caused by the fiercest Illinois snowstorm in twenty-four years, the House and Senate convened in joint session at 3 p.m. on February 8, 1855, to begin the balloting. Mary Lincoln watched the proceedings from the packed gallery.
At the end of the first ballot, Lincoln had 45 votes; followed by Shields, the incumbent, with 41; Trumbull with 5; and Governor Mat-teson and eight other candidates with 1 vote each. Lincoln was seven votes short of a majority. Lincoln had told Washburne two months earlier, “I do not know that it is much advantage to have the largest number of votes at the start.” Nothing changed much through five more ballots; although Lincoln slowly declined to 34 on the fifth ballot, his vote total was back to 36 on the sixth ballot. On the seventh ballot, the regular Democrats made their flanking move. They abandoned Shields, who fell from 41 to 1, and shifted their votes to Matteson, who rose from 0 to 44. On the eighth ballot, Lincoln dropped to 27 and on the ninth to 15. Meanwhile, Matteson had risen to 47, the most that any candidate had yet received and only four votes short of election.
What could Lincoln do? On the one hand, Lincoln hoped that if he could prevent Matteson from winning on one or two more ballots, his original backers might return to him. His old legal colleagues Stephen Logan and Judge Davis encouraged him to hang on. On the other hand, Lincoln was worried that Matteson might be able to win away some of Trumbull’s backers. At this critical moment, Gillespie asked Lincoln what he should do. “You ought to drop me and go for Trumbull,” Lincoln advised. Lincoln had decided he could not take the chance that the Democrats could elect the pro-Nebraska Matteson. He released his backers and instructed his friends to go for Trumbull, a Democrat but an avowed anti-Nebraska man. Lincoln decided that the long-term cause of stopping slavery trumped his short-term ambition. Trumbull was elected on the tenth ballot with the necessary 51 votes.
BALLOTS FOR UNITED STATES SENATE

1855



Lincoln was both philosophical and gracious in defeat. The next day he told Congressman Washburne, “I regret my defeat moderately, but I am not nervous about it.” He added, “On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected.”
Lincoln’s family and friends did not take the defeat as well. Mary Lincoln broke off her long friendship with Julia Trumbull, who had stood up with Mary at her wedding. Thinking of her role within her own marriage, Mary believed Julia could have influenced her husband’s political decision making.
Logan and Davis were furious. Lincoln, they pointed out, who began with 45 votes, actually had 47 different people vote for him, whereas Trumbull had begun with only 5 votes.
Immediately after his defeat, Lincoln told Gillespie “he would never strive for office again.” Yet with more time to consider all that had taken place, Lincoln began to see things in a different light. He realized that the person who had been defeated was not Matteson, nor Shields, nor even himself, but Douglas. Douglas had become the personification of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which, its critics said, opened the door to slavery, not just in the territories, but everywhere. Lincoln told Wash-burne, “his defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain.”
Lincoln respected Trumbull and his sharp, logical mind, and knew he would provide a balance to Douglas in the Senate. On the evening after the election, Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards hosted a reception that had originally been intended as a victory party. The defeated Lincoln surprised many by attending. Elizabeth tried to console him by saying she knew he must be very disappointed. He replied, “Not too disappointed to congratulate my friend Trumbull,” and with those words walked over to shake the hand of the new senator. Trumbull, admiring Lincoln’s behavior, later wrote him: “I shall continue to labor for the success of the Republican cause and the advancement at the next election to the place now occupied by Douglas of that Friend, who was instrumental in promoting my own.”
“I WAS DABBLING IN POLITICS; and, of course, neglecting business. Having since been beaten out, I have gone to work again.” So Abraham Lincoln wrote a long-overdue letter to a New York law firm on March 10, 1855.
Lincoln had foreseen the future of railroads a full twenty years before they brought a revolution in transportation to Illinois. In his first announcement of candidacy for the Illinois legislature in 1832, Lincoln declared, “No other improvement that reason will justify us in hoping for, can equal in utility the rail road.” As he returned from his stint in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1849, the first railroad was winding its way south from Chicago. Innumerable problems and roadblocks resulted in only 110 miles of track being laid by 1850.
Lincoln started representing the Illinois Central Railroad in 1852. First greeted as a boon to transportation, the Illinois Central quickly established a reputation as a large and unpopular bully. It was infamous for striking cows on the rails, setting barns on fire with stray sparks, and losing the freight of its customers.
The railroads needed friends in high places to succeed. Lincoln, like other political leaders, “chalked his hat,” or traveled on railroad passes, regularly. Politicians were lobbied heavily in the state legislature by every small town that wanted to be on the new railroad line. Many politicians and lawyers would become wealthy through land speculation close to the routes of railroad lines. Satisfied to earn his livelihood from his law practice, Lincoln turned away from such speculation, though it was practiced with lucrative results by his close friend David Davis. Railroads needed lawyers to represent them in the contracts and contentions in the 1850s. Lincoln, with his growing stature, found the railroads coming to his door seeking his legal services.
From 1852 through the end of the decade, Lincoln would represent the railroads in about fifty cases, although seldom alone, in five counties in the Eighth Circuit and in appellate cases before the Supreme Court. He was never an employee of the Illinois Central, the most powerful railroad in the state, although he did serve at various times on a retainer. He also brought suit against it on a number of occasions.
Lincoln’s work for the railroad was a departure from his previous legal practice. When he advocated the “economic right to rise” in America, he had in mind the upward path of the farmer or small proprietor that he had come to know in the 1830s and 1840s. He had grown up as a lawyer in a face-to-face society in which he urged his clients to settle because they had to live with one another in small communities. Most of the clients stood on more or less equal footing with one another. As a Whig, he upheld the ideal of the independence of each person, but as a lawyer in the 1850s he represented a powerful corporation determined to use its corporate muscle for profit.
Even when dealing with corporations, Lincoln looked for opportunities to be a mediator. In 1854, he wrote to Milton Brayman, solicitor of the Illinois Central, about an old man from DeWitt County who wanted Lincoln to sue the railroad because it did not keep its word regarding the erection and repair of fences. Lincoln offered advice to Brayman that the railroad should be careful to mend its fences, both physical and political. “A stitch in time may save nine in this matter.”
As the Illinois Central proceeded with construction, it completed a section in 1853 between La Salle and Bloomington in McLean County. Thereupon county officials presented a bill for a tax assessment. The railroad protested, arguing that under the provisions of its charter the legislature had exempted it from all county taxes with the proviso that it pay a charter tax of 5 percent of its annual gross revenues for the first six years after its incorporation in 1851, and 7 percent thereafter. McLean officials argued the state did not have the power to exempt the railroad from county taxation. The railroad was in trouble if every county attempted to levy a tax.
Both sides contacted Lincoln as each prepared to go to court. He believed at issue “is the largest law question that can now be got up in the State.” Approached by the county, he replied that he needed an official letter promising payment if they wanted him to represent them. “I can not afford, if I can help it, to miss a fee altogether.” After waiting eighteen days, Lincoln wrote the Illinois Central that he would accept their offer. Four days later, Brayman sent Lincoln a personal check for $250 as a retainer for the case.
McLean County engaged the services of a prominent team of lawyers—Stephen Logan, John Todd Stuart, and Benjamin S. Edwards. This was Lincoln’s first big case for the Illinois Central and he well understood that success could lead to many more. He prepared carefully. In his appeal on February 28, 1854, Lincoln, for precedent, cited twenty-six cases: four decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and twenty-two decisions from thirteen state courts. Because of the significance and complexity of the case, the circuit court ordered the case reargued before the Illinois Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court heard the case a final time in January 1856. Lincoln argued that because the railroad was held in trust by the state it was exempt from taxation for its first six years while being built. He defended the authority of the legislature to take such action. Judge Walter G. Scates upheld Lincoln’s argument, ruling that the legislature had the authority to exempt the railroad’s payment of county taxes. In his long opinion, Judge Scates cited thirteen of the precedents from Lincoln’s appeal.
Lincoln, overjoyed with the result, believed he had salvaged for the railroad at least $500,000. He presented a bill in person in Chicago of $2,000 for his fee.
The bill was rejected. The railroad replied that Lincoln’s request was as much as Daniel Webster might have charged. Rebuffed, Lincoln started back for Springfield. Stopping in Bloomington, he consulted with a few fellow attorneys. His peers, surprised at Lincoln’s submission of such a modest fee, encouraged him to resubmit a bill for $5,000. When the railroad again refused to pay, Lincoln brought suit in January 1857, in the McLean Circuit Court. Six months later, a jury returned a verdict to pay the plaintiff the full amount of five thousand dollars.
Lincoln would work for the Illinois Central again. This episode tells us how far he had come as a lawyer in twenty years. The man with the reputation as a peaceful mediator for his clients took a stand for himself against the largest corporation in Illinois.
DURING THE FALL CIRCUIT in 1855, Lincoln interrupted his usual routine for a patent case that was attracting national attention. The “Reaper Case,” as it would become known, would be a crucial test case with huge implications for the growing farm community. It also offered a splendid opportunity for a rising Illinois lawyer.
Cyrus McCormick, born three days after Lincoln in 1809, had invented a mechanical reaper in Virginia that could mow, gather, tie, and stack wheat, thereby combining the functions of earlier harvesting machines. McCormick patented his machine in 1834 and started a factory in Chicago in 1847. John H. Manny developed a similar machine in Wisconsin and subsequently moved his factory to Rockford, Illinois. McCormick sued Manny for infringement, demanding damages of $400,000.
Both sides were prepared to hire the best lawyers and spend whatever it took to win the case. McCormick retained nationally known lawyers Edward M. Dickerson of New York and Reverdy Johnson of Washington. The Manny Company hired the country’s leading patent lawyers, George Harding of Philadelphia and Peter H. Watson of New York, as well as Edwin M. Stanton, a rising young lawyer from Pittsburgh. Because the case was to be tried in the federal court in Chicago, Harding sent Watson to Illinois in June to find a prominent local lawyer who would have the trust of the federal judge. Watson, a short, stout man, with red hair and beard, upon meeting the tall, dark Lincoln at his home, was unenthusiastic. Nevertheless, he invited Lincoln to join the defense team and gave him a $500 retainer, telling him there would be a substantial fee upon completion of a successful case. Watson also told Lincoln that he would deliver the closing argument as the Illinois lawyer on the case.
Lincoln determined to give this case his most careful preparation. On July 7, 1855, while in Chicago for the summer session of the U.S. Federal Court, he went out to Rockford and spent time at the Manny factory becoming familiar with their reaper. On July 23, he wrote to Watson, concerned that he had not yet received depositions for the case. “During August, and the remainder of this month, I can devote some time to this case, and, of course, I want all the materials that can be had.” Lincoln’s letter received no answer. Frustrated, Lincoln finally wrote to the Manny headquarters in Rockford on September 1, seeking materials and asking for clarification about the place of the trial. In the weeks before the trial, the case was transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati.
On the morning of September 19, 1855, as Harding and Stanton were walking to the courthouse from the Burnett House in Cincinnati, they came across, in Harding’s words, “a tall rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing” standing on the stone steps. Remembering Watson’s uncomplimentary description of Lincoln, they knew it had to be the Springfield lawyer. Lincoln suggested that they go up to the courthouse “in a gang,” but Stanton prevailed upon Harding to walk without Lincoln.
In Cincinnati, the Manny Company lawyers informed Lincoln he would not give the final argument. In fact, he would have no role in the case. Harding never opened the lengthy brief that Lincoln had prepared. When informed of this, Lincoln asked that the brief be returned so he might destroy it.
The case lasted a week. In all this time, the defense team never included Lincoln in their deliberations, nor even invited him to join them for their meals at the hotel. Judge John McLean entertained all the lawyers at a dinner at his home, but Lincoln was not invited.
Lincoln felt humiliated. He remained in Cincinnati, attending all the court sessions—now reduced to the role of a spectator. He admired the lawyers’ expertise in the technical matters of patents. After the case was decided in favor of the Manny Company, Watson sent Lincoln a check as payment for his participation. Lincoln returned the check, replying that he had no right to any fee beyond the original retainer. Watson sent him the check again, saying he had earned it by his preparation. Lincoln finally cashed it.
Stanton, who was known for his brusque manners and often acidic tongue, was especially rude to Lincoln. He is reputed to have described Lincoln as “a long, lank creature, from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat.” Lincoln told Herndon after he returned to Springfield that he had been “roughly handled by that man Stanton.” Stanton, a careful letter writer, wrote in great detail about what he called “the most important Patent case that has ever been tried,” but said nothing about Lincoln in his letters. The two men would meet again seven years later in very different circumstances.
AS LINCOLN RETURNED to his successful law practice, he continued to be deeply concerned about politics, staying abreast of developments, agonizing over party realignments, and biding his time. Though he did not make public speeches, he did reveal his thoughts and struggles in private letters.
On July 18, 1855, he opened a package containing a gift: Scrap Book on Law and Politics, Men and Times, by George Robertson, an old friend who was presently professor of law at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. The volume contained Robertson’s speeches and letters from a distinguished legal and political career spanning more than forty years. On August 15, Lincoln wrote to Robertson to thank him and to offer his thoughts on issues triggered by Robertson’s lectures.
Robertson, as a young Kentucky congressman in 1819, had spoken of the prospect of “the peaceful extinction of slavery.” Lincoln replied, “Since then we have had thirty six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” Lincoln was saying privately in 1855 what he would not yet say publicly. “The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect anything in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly.”
Lincoln also responded to Robertson’s discussion of liberty. “On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.” He continued, “When we were the political slaves of King George, and we wanted to be free, we called the maxim ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ ” What did all this mean? “The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—for burning fire-crackers!!!”
Lincoln voiced both despair and hope. “The Autocrat of all of Russia will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than our American masters will voluntarily give up their slaves.” He then posed what he believed to be “Our political problem. Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?” Lincoln concluded with a confession and a hope. “The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.” This poignant letter to Robertson, at a time when Lincoln was making no speeches, tracked his thinking as he brooded over ideas that would become central to his future attack upon slavery.
On August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote an even more revealing letter to Joshua Speed. He had received an earlier letter from Speed in which his good friend wrote that it had become clear that he and Lincoln now had quite different positions on the nature and prospect of slavery. Speed stated that he may well be against slavery in principle, but in practice, in Lincoln’s paraphrase, “You say that sooner than yield your legal right to the slave—especially at the bidding of those who are not themselves interested, you would see the Union dissolved.” Lincoln was here confronted, not with an anonymous opponent or an avowed enemy, but with the ideas of his oldest and dearest friend.
At the outset of his letter, Lincoln recalled their common experience in 1841 when they encountered ten or twelve slaves “shackled together with irons” on a steamboat traveling from Louisville to St. Louis. Fourteen years later, Lincoln told Speed, “That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” He then challenged his old friend. “You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.” Lincoln was pained to see that he and Speed “differ about the Nebraska-law.” In private, Lincoln said to Speed, “I look upon that enactment not as a law, but as violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being enacted in violence.”
Speed, in his letter, had asked Lincoln where he stood. Lincoln answered, “That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was in Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso, a measure enacted by the opponents of slavery to prevent its introduction into territories acquired in the Mexican War, as good as forty times, and I never heard any one attempting to un whig me for that. I now do more than oppose the extension of slavery.” Lincoln exaggerated how many times he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso, but once more he disclosed his continuing struggle with identity—including party identity—even as he told his friend that others were seeking to identify him in ways he was not willing to accept.
—

IN THE WINTER OF 1856, Lincoln was rethinking his affiliation with the Whigs as the party continued to splinter, but whether from loyalty or obstinacy, he did not rush to join any of the new movements. On Washington’s birthday, a Republican national organizing convention was to meet in Pittsburgh. The Republican train was gaining speed. Would Lincoln climb aboard?
In early February, two men came to Springfield to raise money and secure arms for the “free-state” forces in Kansas. William Herndon helped organize a meeting to hear their appeal, and in the midst of much excitement, belligerence, and exaggeration, Lincoln was asked to speak. He counseled moderation and spoke against coercion that would lead to bloodshed. “Revolutionize through the ballot box, and restore the Government once more to the affections and hearts of men by making it express, as it was intended to do, the highest spirit of justice and liberty.” At the end of the meeting Lincoln made a donation to be forwarded to free-state supporters in Kansas. As usual, Lincoln remained more moderate in public than in his more candid conversations with trusted friends.
On February 22, 1856, Lincoln boarded the train for Decatur. Paul Selby, editor of the Morgan Journal in Jacksonville, and William Usrey, editor of the Illinois State Chronicle in Decatur, had issued a call for an anti-Nebraska meeting, which was endorsed by editors of twenty-five Illinois newspapers. The purpose of the meeting was to plan for the coming state and national elections. The planners had invited one well-known political figure to attend. Lincoln, who had cultivated a relationship with newspaper editors, accepted their invitation. The editors agreed to oppose the introduction of slavery into the territories and work for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise. They called for an anti-Nebraska convention to meet in Bloomington in May.
At a banquet that evening at the Cassell House, one of the editors proposed that Lincoln run for governor. Lincoln quickly replied that it would not do to have an old-line Whig head the ticket; it would be better to try to elect an anti-Nebraska Democrat. Richard J. Oglesby of Decatur, a hero of the Mexican War, was called upon to make a toast. He toasted Lincoln “as the warm and consistent friend of Illinois, and our next candidate for the U.S. Senate.”
Lincoln rose and said, “The latter part of that sentiment I am in favor of.” He then addressed the dinner guests. He told them that “not being an editor” reminded him of “the ugly man riding through a wood who met a woman, also on horseback. She stopped and exclaimed, ‘Well, for land sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw.’
“ ‘Yes, madam, but I can’t help it,’ said he.
“ ‘No, I suppose not,’ she observed, ‘but you might stay at home.’ ”
Lincoln gave the editors his word that he would “buckle on his armor for the approaching contest.”
In the spring, Herndon took the lead in calling for a county convention to select delegates for the anti-Nebraska convention in Blooming-ton. Lincoln was out of town and Herndon, confident that he knew Lincoln’s sentiments, signed his name. The list of delegates was then published in the Illinois State Journal.
The list had barely been printed when John Todd Stuart stormed into Herndon and Lincoln’s law office asking, “Did Lincoln authorize you to sign the list?”
Herndon replied with an emphatic “No.”
Stuart quickly responded, “Then you have ruined him.” Stuart, who had been Lincoln’s first mentor in the study of law, was yet another person wishing to define him. By 1856, Stuart had become deeply concerned that Lincoln was being recruited by the Republicans, whom he equated with radical abolitionism.
Herndon thought he knew Lincoln’s mind, but immediately wrote him in Tazewell County where he was attending court. He told Lincoln how much of a stir this was causing among his conservative friends. Herndon needed a response right away.
Lincoln responded: “All right; go ahead. Will meet you—radicals and all.”
ON MAY 28, 1856, Lincoln traveled by train from Danville to Decatur on his way to Bloomington. Upon learning there was no train north until the following morning, he strolled about town with other delegates to the upcoming anti-Nebraska convention. While sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, Lincoln reminisced about coming to Decatur twenty-five years earlier as a young man from Indiana. He pointed to the exact place on the public square where he had stopped the wagon and team of oxen he was driving. Lincoln confessed he was worried about what might transpire in Bloomington. He feared the radicals in the northern counties would be well represented in Bloomington, but voiced his concern that there might not be many representatives from the conservative southern Illinois counties.
Arriving in Bloomington the next day, Lincoln made his way to Judge Davis’s mansion where he was invited to stay. Later he stopped in a small jewelry store where he bought his first pair of spectacles for thirty-seven and a half cents. He told his walking companion, lawyer Henry C. Whitney, that “he had got to be forty-seven years old, and ‘kinder’ needed them.”
In the evening, a crowd gathered in front of the Pike House hotel and called for speeches. Lincoln stepped forward, claimed he wasn’t prepared to speak that evening, but then proceeded to do so. He talked about the “outrages” in Kansas and said, “A man couldn’t think, dream, or breathe of a free state there, but what he was kicked, cuffed, shot down and hung.”
On the morning of May 29, 1856, everyone was eager for the arrival of the Chicago dailies. Isaac N. Arnold, a former Democrat and now Free Soil politician from Chicago, stood on the main stairway and read from two stories that the delegates had been following. Eight days earlier a huge Kansas posse, including Missouri “border ruffians,” had swept into Lawrence, Kansas, with the intent of striking terror among the rising free-state population. Finding that the free-state leaders had fled, they proceeded to throw two printing presses into the streets and turned five cannon on the Free State Hotel, finally setting the building on fire. Although no one was killed, homes and businesses were pillaged, and the story of the “Sack of Lawrence” ignited antislavery men across the North.
Arnold then read aloud about events in Washington. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered an eloquent but bitterly antagonistic “Crime against Kansas” speech on May 19 and 20, 1856, including fierce personal criticisms of Senator James Mason of Virginia and Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. On May 22, as the Senate was adjourning, Sumner was attacked by young South Carolina representative Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Butler, and beaten into bloody unconsciousness with a walking cane.
With everyone talking about Kansas and Sumner, the convention was called to order. About 270 delegates, mostly from northern and central Illinois, joined together in Major’s Hall, located on the third floor over Humphrey’s Cheap Store. The call that had gone out was for a “State Convention of the Anti-Nebraska Party of Illinois.” There were at least two stumbling blocks for using the name “Republican.” First, the name had become associated with the abolitionists, and many delegates detested the abolitionists as much as they did Douglas. Second, Douglas had been using the characterization “Black Republicans” as a way to play the race card.


The artist pictures the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on May 22, 1856. Above the scene were words from Henry Ward Beecher: “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon.”

Orville Browning, conservative lawyer from Quincy, led the effort to put together a platform. In its final form, it did not embrace the demands of the abolitionists, but rather reiterated the older logic that Congress had the right to keep slavery out of the territories. It condemned the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and called for the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state. With a nod to the Germans—a potential new force for the Republicans—it remained silent on temperance. As for the vexing issue of nativism, it included the statement that the new party would “proscribe no one, by legislation or otherwise, on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth.” Emerging out of Bloomington was an Illinois Republican Party, moderate in its beliefs and tone, ready to take its place within what had become a national Republican Party.
When the official business of the convention was completed, shouts rang out, “Lincoln! Lincoln! Lincoln!” Lincoln stepped forward, to “deafening applause,” to make the final speech of the convention. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half. The speech was so powerful that the newspaper reporters in the hall, spellbound, put down their pencils after the opening minutes and failed to record what Lincoln said. It was reportedly one of the most compelling speeches of his life. Some said that he spoke extemporaneously, but by now Lincoln never approached even the possibility of such a speech without careful preparation.
The Alton Weekly Courier was the only newspaper that carried a summary of the speech, and it was exceedingly brief. Lincoln spoke of the “pressing reasons” for the Republican Party to step forward at this time. As to the prospect of threats of disunion coming from the South, Lincoln replied, “The Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as the integrity of its territorial parts.”
Because no stenographic reporter recorded the address, it has acquired the title of Lincoln’s “Lost Speech.” It’s surprising that Lincoln, even though he spoke without notes, did not later write the speech out, at least in summary form, for publication by local newspapers. Yet, his passion and eloquence were not lost on his audience. Herndon wrote ten years later, “I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln’s great speeches, and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his life. … He had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up, his eyes were aglow with an inspiration, he felt justice.”
IT WILL FOREVER BE DEBATED whether Lincoln’s political career was essentially continuous or whether there was a new beginning in 1854. The friends who knew him best—even with their great respect for what he had already accomplished—would say there was something new in the anti-Nebraska Lincoln. In 1854, with the speech he delivered at Springfield and again at Peoria, he laid the foundation of ideas he would build upon in the next six years. Like anything new, Lincoln’s ideas went through a refining process. He began with opposition to the extension of slavery in the West in the political disguise of “popular sovereignty.” But he had long ago learned that simple opposition to expansion could never carry the day. Where he began to distinguish himself from his peers was his ability to offer affirmation—of the old Declaration of Independence and of a new vision for America.
Beneath the public figure dwelt a private man forging a deeper moral character as he clarified his personal and political identity. As Lincoln’s political star began to rise, his friends and colleagues often tried to define and sometimes even restrict who he was becoming. But the dynamism of the developing Lincoln could not be confined. Emphasizing his “ancient faith” in the Declaration of Independence, he was not to be bound even to the American Revolution and the founding generation. Though he grieved for the Whig Party, its passing opened up new prospects for political achievement and service that he had not known before. With the birth of the Republican Party, Lincoln left Bloomington with no political office but with something much more important—a political vision for the promise of America that would lead him into the future.


While Lincoln was in Chicago working on a lawsuit some attorney friends asked him for a photograph. He replied, “I don’t know why you boys want such a homely face.” Alexander Hesler tried to brush Lincoln’s hair away from his forehead. This “tousled hair” photograph made Lincoln smile and pleased his friends.