A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 12
A House Divided 1856–58

I BELIEVE THIS GOVERNMENT CANNOT ENDURE, PERMANENTLY HALF SLAVE AND HALF FREE.

I DO NOT EXPECT THE UNION TO BE DISSOLVED—I DO NOT EXPECT THE HOUSE TO FALL—BUT I DO EXPECT IT WILL CEASE TO BE DIVIDED.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Speech at the Republican convention, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858

IN JUNE 1856, ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST NATIONAL REPUBLICANconvention in Philadelphia, Abraham Lincoln was far away in Urbana, Illinois. He had arrived on Tuesday, June 17, to attend a special session of the Champaign County Court. He checked into a room at the American House hotel where he was joined by his close friends Judge David Davis and lawyer Henry C. Whitney.
The proprietor, John Dunaway, called his guests to meals by beating vigorously on a gong situated directly under the room where the three jurists slept. On Thursday morning, after their sleep was disturbed for a second morning, Davis and Whitney, by a majority vote, elected Lincoln to deal with the noisy annoyance. The next day, after the morning session of court, Lincoln went back to the hotel, took the gong down, and “secreted” it between two layers of a dining room table. When the proprietor attempted to call his boarders to the noon meal, he looked high and low but could not find the missing gong. When Whitney and Davis reached their room, there sat Lincoln, “looking amused, sheepish, and guilty, as if he had done something ridiculous as well as reprehensible.” The prank deserved a great laugh, and no one laughed harder than Lincoln.
The following day, June 20, 1856, the Chicago papers, arriving about the time of the noon court break, announced that Lincoln had received 110 votes for vice president at the Republican national convention, the second highest of any candidate. Davis and Whitney were “jubilant” at the news. Davis, recalling the prank of the day before, playfully admonished Lincoln: “Great business for a man who aspires to be Vice President of the United States.” To their surprise, the news “made slight impression on Lincoln.” Finally, he responded, “I reckon it’s not me. There’s another Lincoln down in Massachusetts. I’ve an idea he’s the one.”
The Republicans in Philadelphia offered a validation that Lincoln had become a national Republican leader. Yet, the forty-seven-year-old Lincoln, for a long time reluctant to join the Republican Party, had not held an elected office for seven years and was only one and a half years removed from his defeat for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. Given the whirlwind of events since he reemerged into politics two years before, who could dare predict what the next two years might bring for A. Lincoln, the man with the self-deprecating sense of humor.
THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION convened on June 17 at the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia. The party nominated John C. Frémont as its first presidential candidate. A forty-three-year-old military man and explorer, Frémont had become a hero after his expeditions through the American West. Born in the South, he had served briefly as one of the first two senators from California. He was strongly opposed to slavery. As a celebrity with great name recognition, Frémont won on the first ballot, with 530 votes to 37 for Judge John McLean of Pennsylvania, whom Lincoln had favored.
Delegates nominated fifteen names for vice president. Illinois delegate William B. Archer persuaded John Allison, a congressman from Pennsylvania, to nominate Lincoln. Archer, who had known Lincoln for thirty years, made a seconding speech on behalf of Illinois, calling Lincoln “as pure a patriot as ever lived.”
Lincoln garnered 110 votes on the first ballot, trailing only William L. Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey, who polled 221 votes. Most impressive was that Lincoln received votes from eleven states, stretching from Maine to California. Dayton was elected on the second ballot. Two days later, Archer wrote to Lincoln, “had we moved earlier,” he might have stood a stronger chance at the nomination.
Lincoln learned that a number of people outside of Illinois had stood up to commend his nomination. Lincoln wrote to one of them, John Van Dyke of New Brunswick, New Jersey, who had served with Lincoln in the Thirtieth Congress. He told Van Dyke, “When you meet Judge Dayton present my respects, and tell him I think him a far better man than I for the position he is in.”
LINCOLN THREW HIMSELF into the 1856 presidential campaign. Unlike 1852, when he had done little campaigning for the Whig presidential nominee, General Winfield Scott, Lincoln spoke everywhere on Frémont’s behalf. On June 23, 1856, in Urbana, he praised “the gallant Fremont,” and promised he would “devote considerable of his time to the work” of seeking his election.


Lincoln stumped for the first Republican presidential ticket, John C. Frémont and William Dayton, in 1856.

The Democratic Party, deeply split over the issue of slavery, “bleeding Kansas,” and the ongoing debate over the role of the states versus the federal government, nominated James Buchanan of Pennsylvania over Stephen Douglas as their presidential candidate. Buchanan’s political advantage was his absence. He had been out of the country the past four years serving as ambassador to England, and thus he was the only candidate not tarnished by the bruising battles over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas, who had worked hard to become his party’s star, was now seen by some as too controversial to be elected. Buchanan won the nomination on the seventeenth ballot. The party platform supported “popular sovereignty” as the means of settling the issue of slavery in the territories.
The presidential election of 1856 became a story of contrasts. Buchanan was born into a well-to-do family in Pennsylvania. He had never married. A tall, handsome man, he wore stiff, high stocks about his jowls that accentuated both his height and his formal personality. He had served five terms in the House of Representatives and ten years in the Senate. He also had served as minister to Russia under President Jackson and secretary of state under President Polk, and came to the campaign fresh from his service as minister to the Court of St. James’s in England under President Pierce. Never had a candidate brought more political experience to a presidential campaign.
Frémont was born in Georgia, an illegitimate child of a father who came to the United States as a penniless French-Canadian refugee. He married Jessie Benton, the beautiful daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton, a champion of Western expansion, helped Frémont get assignments in the 1840s to explore the entire American West. Frémont capitalized on five successful expeditions, traveling across the Rocky Mountains to California, to position himself as a young hero of a new party. Ironically, it was Buchanan, as secretary of state, who convinced the Senate to publish Frémont’s Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842, which had enhanced Frémont’s fame. Seldom had a candidate brought less political experience to a campaign.
The Republicans set out to campaign on the theme “Free Soil, Free Speech, and Frémont.” Stories of “bleeding Kansas” were kept alive by on-the-scene reports in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Democrats countered that Frémont was a “black abolitionist,” the front man for a party of radicals.
In this frenzied environment, Lincoln spoke out on the campaign trail in support of Frémont, but the scope of his speeches was broader than support for the candidate, whom he did not know. Long sections of his speeches consisted of historical and philosophical analysis and made almost no reference to Frémont.
In the summer of 1856, Lincoln privately wrestled with a number of ideas. He wrote a long note to himself—undated, but probably from July—in which he sought to define the issues at stake in the campaign. He began, as he almost always did in his private notes, with a problem. “It is constantly objected to Fremont & Dayton, [Frémont’s vice-presidential candidate] that they are supported by a sectional party, who, by their sectionalism, endanger the National Union.” The Democrats continually charged that the Republicans, because of their strong anti-slavery beliefs, represented only the North and parts of the West, and thus could never be a national party. Lincoln believed that the issue of sectionalism, “more than all others,” was causing persons “really opposed to slavery extension, to hesitate.” This was the “reason, I now propose to examine it, a little more carefully than I have heretofore done, or seen it done by others.”
In his private reflection, Lincoln engaged in a systematic examination of all the issues involved in sectionalism. He began by exploring the ways Democrats tried to make the Republican question—“Shall slavery be allowed to extend into U.S. territories, now legally free?”—into a sectional issue. In his answer, Lincoln engaged in a long backward gaze at previous candidates for president, noting which ones were from free and slave states. He pointed out that in 1844, the Democratic Party had nominated a Southern candidate, James Polk of Tennessee, but since 1848, as the debate over the extension of slavery escalated, the Democrats nominated only Northern candidates, “each vieing to outbid the other for the Southern vote.”
Questions punctuate every paragraph in Lincoln’s note. Toward the end, he asked, “Then, which side shall yield?” His answer:
Do they really think the right ought to yield to the wrong? Are they afraid to stand by the right? Do they fear that the constitution is too weak to sustain them in the right? Do they really think that by right surrendering to wrong, the hopes of our constitutions, our Union, and our liberties, can possibly be bettered?
This note demonstrates a major reason Lincoln was becoming such a persuasive public speaker. He was willing to engage in the hard task of examining an opponent’s arguments fully and fairly.
WHILE IN CHICAGO to try cases before the federal court, Lincoln accepted an invitation to address a Saturday evening open-air meeting in Dearborn Park on July 19, 1856. Referring to the Democrats’ nomination of Buchanan, Lincoln said it “showed how the South does not put up her own men for the Presidency, but holds up the prize that the ambition of Northern men may make bids for it.” The Chicago Democratic Press reported that Lincoln “demonstrated in the strongest manner, that the only issue before us, is freedom or slavery.”
In Galena on July 23, 1856, Lincoln spoke of the challenge of Mil-lard Fillmore, candidate of the Know-Nothings, who in 1856 officially adopted the name the “American Party.” Fillmore, elected as the Whig vice president in 1848, had succeeded to the presidency in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor. As president, Fillmore’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850 quickly alienated many Whigs. When the Whig Party collapsed in the early 1850s, Fillmore refused to join the new Republicans. The Know-Nothing American Party nominated Fillmore at their convention in February.
Fillmore’s appeal came from his nativist platform commitment: “Americans must rule America.” He accused both the Democrats and the Republicans of being “Disunionists.” Lincoln was deeply concerned that Fillmore’s American Party could deny the Republicans an election victory by playing the role of the spoiler, as he had seen the Liberty Party do before. In the conclusion of his Galena speech, Lincoln exclaimed, “All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug—nothing but folly. We won’t dissolve the Union, and you SHANT.
During the 1856 campaign, Lincoln received invitations to speak in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa—recognition of his growing national stature within the Republican Party. The only out-of-state invitation he accepted was to a huge Republican state “concourse” in Kalamazoo, Michigan. On August 27, Lincoln followed the logic of his July private note by declaring that the crux of the campaign was “to learn what people differ about.” He stated, “The question of slavery, at the present day, should be not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question.” He presented the arguments of his opponents, repeating the questionable charge of the Richmond Enquirer “that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen.” He also responded to the complaint that Frémont and his supporters were abolitionists and that the Republicans were disunionists. Lincoln’s rhetorical strategy was to ask his audience the questions that he wanted to answer. After praising the United States as “the wonder and admiration of the whole world,” he responded to the question, “What is it that has given us so much prosperity?” by responding, “That every man can make himself.”
LINCOLN RETURNED HOME ON October 28, 1856, after four months of vigorous campaigning. By his own count he had spoken more than fifty times during the presidential campaign. Although his speeches appeared to reporters and audiences to be extemporaneous, little did they realize how much prior effort, including writing his private notes, went into them. The Amboy Times captured the distinctiveness of Lincoln’s maturing political speaking, observing, “His language is pure and respectful, he attacks no man’s character or motives, but fights with arguments.”
Lincoln came home to a house divided. Mary did not support Frémont. She wrote her younger half sister Emilie Todd Helm in Lexington, contrasting her political views with those of her husband. Knowing Emilie’s strong Southern viewpoint, Mary first defended her husband. “ Altho’ Mr L is, or was a Fremont man, you must not include him with so many of those, who belong to that party, an Abolitionist.” She further explained, “All he desires is, that slavery, shall not be extended, let it remain where it is.” Mary then explained her own political position. “My weak woman’s heart was too Southern in feeling, to sympathize with any but Fillmore.”
On Tuesday, November 4, 1856, a cold and muddy election day in Springfield, Lincoln was the 226th voter at polling place number two. Across the nation there was intense interest and an immense turnout. People stood in queues for more than two hours in New York City to vote. Nearly 83 percent of the nation’s eligible voters went to the polls, up nearly 7 percent from the election of 1852.
Lincoln had to wait for several days before the results became known in Illinois. In the end, Frémont lost, but William Bissell won for governor by a majority of five thousand, the first statewide victory for the new Republican Party. As Lincoln had feared, the Fillmore vote hurt Frémont, but the American Party vote ran below expectations.
Although Buchanan triumphed in the electoral college with 174 votes to 114 for Frémont and 8 for Fillmore, he did not win a majority of the popular vote. He received 1,832,955 votes (45.3 percent) compared to 1,340,537 (33.1 percent) for Frémont, and 871,955 (21.6 percent) for Fillmore. Buchanan won five Northern states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and California—and every Southern state except Maryland, which went for Fillmore. Frémont won Maine, New Hampshire, and Michigan, which had been Democratic mainstays. But he received only 1,196 votes in the South.
President-elect Buchanan, greeting supporters at Wheatland, his estate on the outskirts of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, offered his interpretation of his victory. “The storm of abolition against the South has been gathering for almost a quarter of a century,” he said, a reference to the growth of antislavery sentiment in the North. More recently, “Republicanism was sweeping across the North like a tornado.” Then he offered a prediction for the future, one that would prove entirely wrong. “The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious morn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country.”
Upon reflection, Republicans called the 1856 presidential election a “victorious defeat.” Privately, many Republican leaders complained that Frémont had proved to be long on bravado and short on both political experience and wisdom. There were, however, many encouraging signs for the future. Frémont had defeated Buchanan by more than 80,000 votes in New York. Buchanan’s margin of victory in Indiana was less than 2,000 votes, and less than 1,000 votes in Pennsylvania. If the Frémont and Fillmore votes were combined, Frémont would have won both Illinois and New Jersey. If Frémont had won Pennsylvania, and either Indiana or Illinois, the Republicans would have been victorious. In less than twelve months, the Republican Party had become the strongest party in the North. The Republican candidate in 1860 would stand a real chance of winning the presidential election.
LINCOLN HAD PLAYED A VITAL ROLE in the 1856 election. With his help, Republicans had won the complete state ticket in Illinois. Although without office, he had nevertheless become the leading Republican in Illinois by the end of 1856. One month after the election, Lincoln was introduced to the “deafening cheers” of three hundred people at a Republican banquet at the Tremont House in Chicago. Recalling that throughout the campaign the Republicans had been “assailed as the enemies of the Union,” Lincoln declared that the new party was, above all, “the friend of the Union.” Responding to the recent final annual message of outgoing president Franklin Pierce, in which he had trumpeted the “triumph of good principles and good men,” Lincoln declared that Buchanan did not triumph in the recent election, but that “all of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand.” He noted that during the campaign, the Richmond Enquirer, “an avowed advocate of slavery,” had invented the phrase “State equality.” In his closing charge to these Republican stalwarts, Lincoln declared, “Let us reinaugurate the good old ‘central ideas’ of the Republic.” What did these ideas mean in the present crisis? “We shall again be able not to declare, that ‘all States as States, are equal,’ nor yet that ‘all citizens as citizens are equal,’ but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these but much more, that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” Lincoln asked his audience, “Can we not come together” around this basic belief?
Even in the midst of his growing public esteem, Lincoln struggled privately with insecurity when he compared his political career to that of his longtime rival, Stephen Douglas, the senior senator from Illinois. In December 1856, Lincoln spelled out his struggle on a scrap of paper. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted.” Lincoln, for his eyes only, admitted, “Even then, we were both ambitious; I perhaps, quite as much so as he.” What about today? “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.” He quickly added, “I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached.” Having confessed his envy, though, Lincoln offered a soulful affirmation about his hope that others could share in his own search for eminence, “so reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation.” Lincoln, knowing of Douglas’s disdain for African-Americans, declared that whatever ascent he may yet experience might be accompanied by the rise of the “oppressed”—those who had been the subject of every one of his addresses since 1854. He concluded, “I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
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THE STORY IS TOLD of Lincoln returning to Springfield after three months away on the circuit. When he encountered his neighbor, James Gourley, Lincoln asked in jest, “Do you know where Lincoln lives?” After a moment, Lincoln, with a wry smile, pointed to his house and exclaimed, “He used to live here!” Lincoln’s feigned disorientation was a sharp comment on what Mary Lincoln had wrought.
Thirteen years after the purchase of their home at Eighth and Jackson, Mary began the effort to raise their modest cottage into a full two-story house. Having grown increasingly independent through her husband’s long absences, Mary had become the manager of the Lincoln household. She wanted more space for a family of three rambunctious boys, Robert, Tad, and Willie, plus a live-in maid. Her husband was now making about three thousand dollars a year from his law practice. She believed the Lincolns deserved a home more in keeping with her husband’s position as a prominent lawyer and politician, and where she could entertain more. In September 1854, she sold eighty acres of farmland in Sangamon County her father had given her for $1,200, further enhancing her independence.
Contractors Daniel Hannon and Thomas A. Ragsdale began constructing a new east wing of the house. Mary’s cousin’s wife said in a letter that the Lincolns had “commenced raising” the back part of their house. “I think they will have room enough before they are done, particularly as Mary seldom uses what she has.” The new construction meant that Mary and Abraham would have separate but connecting bedrooms. This arrangement was common in middle-class families and not a commentary on their marriage or sexual relations. Visitors reported that Lincoln often entertained business guests in his bedroom.
As the project approached completion, Mary bought wallpaper and new furniture from John Williams and Company. She shifted some of her massive Empire pieces upstairs and placed the new, early Victorian pieces in the downstairs formal front parlor and the family sitting room. The final cost of the expansion was $1,300. Lincoln returned to find a fine-looking home newly adorned with light brown paint and dark green shutters. The renovations were in the Greek Revival tradition of the times, which Lincoln approved, with its associations with classical tradition and democracy.
Mary Lincoln was very ambitious for her husband’s political career. Her many dinners and receptions in their newly renovated house provided space for him to network with political friends visiting the Illinois state capital. In the winter of 1857, conversations at these gatherings often turned to politics and the U.S. Supreme Court.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, in his travels in America in the 1830s, had examined the place of the Supreme Court in comparison to the high courts of England and other nations in Europe. He concluded, “A more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.” Yet in the growing political crisis of the 1850s, the Court had been largely silent. It was the only one of the three branches of government not deeply involved in the conflict over the extension of slavery into the federal territories. But the Court was about to exercise its power. Beginning in December 1856, news spread that the Supreme Court would consider a case that had been making its way through the lower courts for more than ten years.


Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857.

In 1830, Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon working at the Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, bought a slave named Dred Scott. Scott accompanied Emerson to Fort Armstrong at Rock Island, Illinois, in 1833, and then to Fort Snelling, in the northern part of the Louisiana Territory, near present-day St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1836. Scott returned with Emerson to Missouri in 1838. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott sought to buy his freedom from Emerson’s widow. When she refused, he petitioned the Missouri Circuit Court at St. Louis on April 6, 1846, seeking his freedom, arguing that he had lived for three years in a free state.
Scott lost his first trial on a technicality but won a second trial in 1850 when the Missouri court ruled that once a slave left Missouri he should be considered free. Mrs. Emerson proved to be as determined as Scott, appealing the court’s decision.
Scott’s final hope was an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Montgomery Blair, a former resident of St. Louis, agreed to represent Scott without fee. Blair, at age forty-one, whose father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., had been a member of Andrew Jackson’s “kitchen cabinet,” had established his own reputation as a lawyer in Washington. The Supreme Court announced it would hear the case during its term in December 1856.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presided at the December hearing. Taney, born into a wealthy slaveholding family in southern Maryland in 1777, had served as both attorney general and secretary of the treasury in the Jackson administration, before being appointed the fifth chief justice of the United States in 1836. Standing before Taney and eight associate justices, Blair contended that Emerson had emancipated Scott when he took him both to the free state of Illinois and to the Louisiana Territory, where slavery was prohibited. He also presented examples from five states that had treated African-Americans as citizens, as had Missouri in earlier years.


Montgomery Blair represented Scott, contending that he became emancipated when his owner brought him into free territory.

Politicians and the press buzzed with rumors of what the Court would or would not do. Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia wrote to a friend, “The decision will be a marked epoch in our history.” The New York Courier wrote, prophetically, “The Court, in trying this case, is itself on trial.”
Reading reports of the trial, Lincoln wrote a private note on the Dred Scott case, probably in January 1857. He began with a question: “What would be the effect of this, if it should ever be the creed of a dominant party in the nation?” He pondered the “full scope” and the “narrow scope” of the result if the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was still a slave. Lincoln did not argue his own position, but was preparing himself if the position of Douglas and his followers in the Democratic Party prevailed. He wrote that whatever the Court’s decision on this constitutional question, it must be obeyed.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on February 11, 1857. Senator Henry Geyer of Missouri argued that “blacks are not citizens” even if taken into free territories. Reverdy Johnson, the former attorney general of the United States, presented an impassioned defense of slavery, contending, “Slavery promises to exist through all time, so far as human vision can discover.”
Interest in the case heightened when President Buchanan referred to it in his inaugural address on March 4, 1857. Buchanan, coming into office convinced the problems in the country were the fault of the Northern abolitionists, was determined to reach out to the Southern pro-slavery members of his own party. He believed the long-awaited decision in the Dred Scott case could be a major step in that direction. In his address he stated that “it is understood” that the case will “be speedily and finally settled.” How did he come to this understanding? He had spoken with Chief Justice Taney in late February and learned the basic outline of the verdict. Trying to head off opposition, Buchanan declared, “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit.”
Only two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, at eleven o’clock on March 6, 1857, Taney and the eight black-robed justices entered the Supreme Court on the ground floor of the Capitol. Customarily, when the Supreme Court announced its opinions, it did so in splendid isolation, but on this Friday morning newspaper reporters and spectators filled the chamber. Taney, only eleven days before his eightieth birthday, began reading in a low, at times almost muted, voice from a manuscript held in his unsteady hands. For the next two hours he read the Court’s 7–2 decision.
The Court ruled, first, that Scott was not a citizen and therefore not entitled to sue in federal court. Rehearsing the long arc of history, Taney declared that blacks had “been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations.” Second, the Court ruled that the U.S. Congress’s presumption of authority to exclude slavery from the federal territories was unconstitutional. To make this move, the chief justice engaged in a judicial juggling act with fact and interpretation. He had to admit that the first Congress did enact the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbidding slavery in those territories it covered, but that subsequent Congresses had no right to forbid slavery in future territories acquired by the United States. Third, reiterating the decisions of the lower courts, Taney found that Dred Scott was and would always be a slave according to Missouri law.
Taney may have hoped to bring peace to the beginning of Buch anan’s administration, but instead the decision unleashed a storm of protest. Republicans charged partisanship. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other leading abolitionists went further and called for immediate disunion. Their focus was on the fact that five of the nine justices came from the South. Taney and the other justices, who heretofore had toiled in near obscurity, were negatively profiled in Northern newspapers. In the South, the decision was hailed as a victory.


The fugitive slave law, passed in 1850, became a source of continuing controversy. This print shows a group of four black men—possibly freedmen—ambushed by a posse of six armed whites in a cornfield.

LINCOLN MADE NO IMMEDIATE public comment after the Court’s decision. Instead, he worked tirelessly in private to understand every facet of the opinion, just as he had done after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was announced. Understanding that the Dred Scott decision was an attack upon the principles of the new Republican Party, he bided his time, preparing to speak at the right moment.
Stephen Douglas also remained silent about the decision throughout the spring. On June 7, 1857, at the invitation of the U.S. District Court in Springfield, Douglas broke his silence. Lincoln was in the audience.
Douglas declared that the “main proposition” of the Dred Scott decision was that “a negro descended from slave parents … is not and can not be a citizen of the United States.” He attacked those who would say that the Declaration of Independence pledged equality for African-Americans. “No one can vindicate the character, motive, and conduct of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, except upon the hypothesis that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared men to have been created free and equal.” Douglas insisted that the signers were referring solely to white British subjects.
Douglas’s speech attracted national attention. James Gordon Bennett’s Democratic New York Herald offered an enthusiastic endorsement for more than the speech. “The curtain of 1860 is partially lifted, and we have a peep behind the scenes.” The Herald believed, “As a democratic Presidential aspirant, Mr. Douglas is now without a rival in the great Northwest.”
Lincoln, roused by Douglas’s address, decided to answer him directly. For two weeks in June, he studied in the Illinois Supreme Court’s law library on the first floor of the state capitol. He read the written opinions of the justices, drawing especially on the dissent of Associate Justice Benjamin Curtis, and perused commentaries on the decision in a variety of newspapers.
On the evening of June 26, 1857, Lincoln offered his response in the statehouse. It was not the kind of answer many expected. Walking in with law books under his arms, Lincoln’s speech was not that of a Republican firebrand, but rather a thoughtful, calm address.
He began by assuring his audience that he did not agree with those who advocated resisting the Court’s ruling. Instead, he said he believed as much as Douglas—“perhaps more”—in obedience to the rulings of the judiciary, especially when they involved matters of the Constitution. He quickly added, “But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this.”
Lincoln, relying on his legal sleuthing, instructed his audience on the true way a Supreme Court decision could be accepted by everyone. The decision would need to be unanimous, without “partisan bias,” based in precedent, and making use of agreed-upon “historical facts.” Lincoln then proceeded to demonstrate how this decision did not inspire public confidence because it failed on every one of these points.
In Lincoln’s earlier speeches, he assailed the immorality of slavery but seldom spoke of the condition of slaves. This time, in the midst of historical argument contrasting the days of the founders with the present day, Lincoln’s language became emotional when he described the bondage of African-Americans. “All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry.” What has been the result? “They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys.” Lincoln, in his evocative word portrait, declared it was “grossly incorrect” to say, as Douglas and many in the South claimed, that African-American slaves were better off today than at the birth of the nation in 1776.
One by one, Lincoln took up Douglas’s points, often quoting him at length. A main target was Douglas’s charge that those who opposed the Dred Scott decision supported racial equality. Lincoln, in the strategy of a debater, first conceded there was “a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” He repeated Douglas’s infamous charge that when Republicans evoked the Declaration of Independence, they “do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!”
Now, having conceded, Lincoln objected. “Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.” Both then and now, people quoting Lincoln often stop here. But Lincoln continued with his main point, words that many have failed to cite. “In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” Lincoln, in step with his audience, was unwilling to call an African-American his social equal. But the power of his logic was not what he denied but what he affirmed.
Having taken on Douglas, Lincoln quickly turned to Chief Justice Taney, for both, in Lincoln’s eyes, were guilty of using and abusing the Declaration of Independence. The chief justice had stated that Jefferson’s self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” would “seem to embrace the whole human family,” but argued that the language did not mean what it said. It was “too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included.”
Lincoln, momentarily backed into a corner by the argument that if the framers of the Declaration of Independence intended to include African-Americans within the phrase, “all men are created equal,” why did they not, “at once,” actually place them on an equality with the whites? Lincoln offered a striking but subtle answer: “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” Lincoln said the founders did define, “with tolerable distinctiveness, in what respect they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant.”
Lincoln built into his affirmation a creative tension between intent and action. He admitted that at the time of the Declaration of Independence, all men were not “then” enjoying such equality, or even that the framers had the power to “confer” such equality. Lincoln believed the framers were thinking in the future tense so that the “enforcement” of this right “might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” Speaking in his own future tense, Lincoln looked forward to imagine how the equality of all persons might be transformed from intent to reality. He fervently hoped that the “maxim” that “all men are created equal” should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting a happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
Although Lincoln delivered a forceful reply to Douglas, it failed to satisfy all Republicans. For some, his words seemed like a scholarly lecture that lacked the white heat of indignation. One responded that it was “too much on the old conservative order.” Not a few wondered if the genial Lincoln was a match for the firebrand Douglas.
LINCOLN’S RESPONSE to the Dred Scott decision was his only political speech in 1857. Lincoln spent the bulk of the political off-year busy in his law practice. His cases ranged from repaying a personal friendship from his New Salem days to the corporate contest between river and rail.
By the middle of the 1850s, picturesque and romantic travel on the Mississippi, which would soon inspire Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, was in its final chapters, although not many suspected so at the time. Railroads had snaked across the land and now forded rivers by bridge. In 1854, the Rock Island Bridge Company announced plans to build the first bridge to span the Mississippi River. The proposed bridge, between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, sparked public protests stoked by river interests, such as ferry operators. In a case brought in July 1855, Associate Justice John McLean of the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the company’s rights to build the bridge. Constructed with more than 620,000 pounds of cast and wrought iron, the bridge finally opened on April 21, 1856, when a single locomotive, the Des Moines, crossed to the cheers of people and the sound of church bells on both banks of the river.
Just two weeks later, on May 6, 1856, the steamer Effie Afton, a fast and sleek side-wheeler with a deck 230 feet long and side wheels 30 feet in diameter, sailed up the Mississippi from its home port in Cincinnati. In the evening, as the pilot maneuvered his way through the snags and reefs of the mighty river swollen by spring rains, he came for the first time to the new bridge. The boat slowed as it attempted to navigate into the draw of the bridge. Suddenly, one of its side wheels struck one of the piers, and the huge boat bounced over against the pier on the other side. The impact jarred a small coal stove on board, and within minutes the boat was burning. Passengers and crew managed to escape, but the Effie Afton sank with all its cargo. The wooden trusses of the bridge caught fire, and a section fell into the river. By the next day, the entire bridge had collapsed into the Mississippi.
The destruction of the boat and bridge stirred up deep feelings on the river and in towns along the Mississippi. For the next few weeks, steamboat captains blew their whistles in that part of the Mississippi to mark the obliteration. The St. Louis Republican denounced the bridge as “an intolerable nuisance,” and editorialized, “We have rarely seen such illustration of supercilious insolence, as have been presented by advocates of the bridge.” The Chicago Tribune, taking the exact opposite opinion, responded that the facts of the case “do not warrant the incessant clamor” of those who insisted that river bridges should be torn down. “We trust that the outcries of the St. Louis and river press may be silenced.”
John S. Hurd, owner of the Effie Afton, sued to recover the value of the boat and cargo, $65,000 in total, from the Rock Island Railway, the bridge’s parent company. The ostensible parties in the suit were Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Co., but the real opponents embraced much larger entities: Chicago, the railroads, and east-west traffic versus St. Louis, the riverboats, and north-south travel.
Norman B. Judd, general counsel for the Rock Island Railway, wanted the best lawyer possible to join him in defending the railroad. One of the five anti-Nebraska Democrats who had opposed Lincoln’s bid for the Senate in 1855, Judd had become a Republican and now served as chairman of the Republican state committee. He turned to Lincoln to lead the defense in this high-profile case that attracted national attention.
In preparation for the trial, Lincoln, with his omnivorous craving for information, traveled to the scene of the disaster. He interviewed Benjamin Brayton, Sr., the engineer who designed the bridge, about bridge construction. He sat down at the head of the new bridge with Ben Brayton, Jr., and with his long legs hanging over the edge, questioned the fifteen-year-old boy about the currents of the river. He hired several men to pilot the steamer Keokuk through the draw of the bridge to check the boat’s responses to the winds and the currents in relation to the piers. He conducted experiments by placing different kinds of objects in the water and observing them drifting toward the draw. Lincoln, at the height of his legal practice, understood well that complicated court cases are often won or lost well before the judge brings down his gavel to begin the formal court proceedings.
The case began in Chicago sixteen months later on September 8, 1857, with Supreme Court justice McLean presiding. The structure of the federal court system called for each Supreme Court justice to serve as the presiding judge of one of the nine circuit courts. The Chicago Democratic Press devoted extra space to the trial because the case involved “a fundamental national struggle” between “the great natural channel of trade of the Mississippi Valley” and the railroads, “the great artificial lines of travel and communication.” The lawyers for the plaintiff called fifty men who made their living on rivers, including captains and pilots; each argued that the bridge was an obstacle to river traffic. Judd and Lincoln called six engineers, as well as many ordinary citizens, who testified that the bridge was perfectly safe. Judd charged that the misfortune of the Effie Afton was due simply to “the carelessness of her officers.”
On the afternoon of September 22, 1857, Lincoln began the defense’s closing argument. The absence of an official court record was fortunately remedied by a newspaper reporter who, using the new skill of shorthand, wrote out in detail Lincoln’s extensive address. In a highly contentious case, being tried each day in the press, Lincoln began by saying “he did not propose to assail anybody.” He had “no prejudice” against steamboats or against St. Louis. Rather, he asked the jury to stand with him as they witnessed the “astonishing growth” of the West, of Illinois, and of Iowa, and other young communities west of the Mississippi. Why were they growing so rapidly? Because of the free flow of east-west travel now enhanced by the railroad. Did the jury want to compare north-south to east-west travel? Lincoln, the master of facts, told them that from September 6, 1856, to August 8, 1857, 12,586 freight cars and 74,179 passengers had passed over the rebuilt Rock Island Bridge. He also pointed out that during this same time period river traffic was closed “four days short of four months” due to ice in the river. He presented statistics showing that of the 959 subsequent boat passings under the bridge, only 7 had suffered any kind of damage. His real point was that the accidents were “tapering off.” Lincoln declared, “As the boatmen get cool, the accidents get less.”
When Lincoln resumed his closing argument the next morning he appeared with a wooden model of the Effie Afton. Employing all of his former skills as boatman and surveyor, he spoke to the jury of the angular position of the piers, the course of the river, the speed of the currents, the depth of the channel, and the speed of the boat, all to demonstrate that the boat crashed into the pier of the bridge because of the pilot’s carelessness and because her starboard wheel had not been working.
Lincoln understood that this case was about the collision, not simply of boat and bridge, but of past and future. No one enjoyed rivers and boats more than Lincoln. As a teenager, he had traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans in one of the great and harrowing adventures of his life, almost getting killed in an assault. He first came to New Salem by boat, and almost immediately upon settling there became a leading proponent of developing boat traffic on the Sangamon as a way of enhancing the future of his new home. He had patented a device to help boats surmount sandbars and shoals in rivers and lakes. But, by the 1850s, Lincoln understood that to hug too tightly to the boat’s tiller was to cling to the past. Lincoln’s political grammar always gravitated to the future tense.
On September 24, 1857, Judge McLean announced that the jury, which voted 9 for the bridge and 3 against, was deadlocked and thus dismissed. Litigation against the bridge would continue all the way until December 1862, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the bridge could remain. Five years after the original trial, a war, not a bridge, would suspend all commercial business on the Mississippi River.
IF THE EFFIE AFTON case was about the future, in the fall of 1857 Lincoln was drawn back to his past in a case growing out of the behavior of some rowdies at a religious revival. In August, a two-week evangelistic camp meeting was held at Virgin’s Grove near the site of New Salem, which had been abandoned by 1840. On August 29, at a makeshift bar on the outskirts of the meetings, William “Duff” Armstrong, twenty-four-year-old son of Jack Armstrong, Lincoln’s wrestling friend from New Salem, and another young man named James Norris got into a fracas with James Metzker. Norris struck Metzker with a three-foot block of wood while Armstrong hit him with a slungshot, a lead weight wrapped in a leather pouch and fastened to thongs. Metzker died while attempting to escape on his horse. Duff Armstrong and James Norris were charged with murder. Duff’s mother, Hannah, appealed to Lincoln, asking if he would help. He said he would.
Duff Armstrong’s case came to trial on May 7, 1858. Norris had already been convicted in an earlier, separate trial. In the courtroom, on the second floor of the Cass County courthouse in Beardstown, Lincoln took great care in selecting the jury, preferring young men in their twenties who might sympathize with another, admittedly wild young man. Charles Allen, the key witness, swore that from a distance of thirty yards, at eleven o’clock in the evening, he saw clearly how the fight developed. When asked how he could be so certain, he answered that the moon was shining directly above. At that moment the outlook seemed dim for the defendant.


Lincoln defended Duff Armstrong, son of his old wrestling partner, Jack Armstrong in a murder trial in 1858.

Lincoln’s cross-examination of Allen began in an understated way. He enticed from the witness, through different questions, the repeated assertion that he had seen clearly what had happened. Lincoln, who had been speaking in a conversational tone, suddenly changed his demeanor and approach. In a dramatic moment, he called for an almanac, which a court officer brought him. Lincoln read from Jayne’s Almanac the decisive sentence that the moon had already set before the fight ensued on the evening of August 29, 1857. The witness could not have seen what he asserted he saw. As several members of the jury stated later, “The almanac floored the witness.”
There were tears in Lincoln’s eyes when in his closing argument he told the jury “of his once being a poor, friendless boy; that Armstrong’s father took him into his house, fed and clothed him & gave him a home.” William Walker, Lincoln’s cocounsel in the trial, remembered that Lincoln spoke “of his kind feelings toward the mother of the prisoner, a widow.” J. Henry Shaw, who prosecuted the case for the state, believed, “It was generally admitted that Lincoln’s speech and personal appeal to the jury saved Armstrong.”
When the trial was over Lincoln went down to Beardstown to visit Duff’s mother. She asked him what she owed him for his legal services. He replied, “Why—Hannah, I shant charge you a cent—never.”
WHILE LINCOLN, IN 1857, was enjoying the most productive year in his legal career, he kept one eye on the latest news about Stephen Doug las. The calm that seemed to have settled in over Kansas was deceptive. In Lecompton, the territorial capital, located on the south bank of the Kansas River between Topeka and Lawrence, a constitutional convention convened on September 7 on the second floor of a new black-walnut clapboard building. The delegates had been selected in an election on June 15, but nearly all the antislavery men, who distrusted the territorial legislature, had boycotted it. The results of the sham election were trickling in just as Lincoln was answering Douglas at Spring-field on June 26. Lincoln, in his speech, called the voting in Kansas “altogether the most exquisite farce ever enacted.”
The meeting at Lecompton proposed two options. Voters could choose to endorse a constitution with “no slavery” but that legalized slavery for those already there—about two hundred slaves—and their progeny. Or voters could choose a constitution “with slavery” that legalized new slaves brought into the territory as well as those who were already there. The convention proposed that there be an election, not on the whole constitution, but only on the plank on slavery. When the election was held in December the vote for slavery—again with most antislavery men boycotting—was 6,143 to 569.
President Buchanan, who had wished the vote had been on the entire constitution, nevertheless offered his endorsement and encouraged Congress to move forward quickly to admit Kansas as a new slave state. When the new Congress assembled in December, Buchanan, who was lobbied by Southern leaders, offered his first annual message to an expectant Congress. In it he praised “the great principle of popular sovereignty” as he embraced the provisions in the Lecompton Constitution.
The next day, December 9, 1857, Stephen Douglas answered the president. He condemned the Lecompton arrangement as a sham. Furthermore, he announced he would fight Buchanan and his allies over it. Why? Lecompton, an effort by a small minority, went completely against the principles of popular sovereignty. He accused Buchanan of misinterpreting the meaning of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To be sure, Douglas was unhappy with the Buchanan administration; he had learned early on that he would not be the trusted adviser and dealmaker he expected to be. But the real issue for Douglas was popular sovereignty. “I have spent too much strength and breadth and health, too, to establish this great principle in the popular heart, now to see it frittered away.”
When the Senate reconvened in January 1858, an unlikely spectacle began taking place. Douglas, who in 1854 had served as floor manager of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, now allied himself with Republican senators Salmon Chase, Henry Wilson, and Benjamin Wade. Wilson, an antislavery senator from Massachusetts, opined that if Douglas would cross the aisle and become a Republican, it would “bring more weight to our cause than any ten men in the country.”
Douglas’s sudden change prompted the question in all quarters: What was he up to? Horace Greeley, ever the kingmaker, editorialized in the Tribune, “His course has not been merely right, it has been conspicuously, courageously, eminently so.” Greeley counseled Republicans that they throw in with Douglas or face certain defeat in the upcoming senatorial election. Following Greeley’s lead, a Republicans for Douglas movement began to gather momentum in the East.
Lincoln, with his ear ever attuned to the latest political news, was deeply alarmed. At the end of 1857, he wrote three letters to Senator Lyman Trumbull. He asked, what is “your general view of the then present aspect of affairs?” On December 28, Lincoln wrote, “What does the New-York Tribune mean by its constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying Douglas?” Did Greeley speak for “the sentiments of the republicans in Washington”? Had leaders in Washington “concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois”? Lincoln acknowledged to Trumbull that he had heard of “no republican here going over to Douglas,” but he was concerned that “if the Tribune continues to din his praises into the ears of its five or ten thousand republican readers in Illinois, it is more than can be hoped that all will stand firm.” Lincoln’s plans for a Senate race against Douglas in 1858 were suddenly being challenged. The usually patient Lincoln was plainly fretful.
Trumbull replied on January 3, 1858, attempting to calm Lincoln’s anxieties. He began by admitting to Lincoln that “the unexpected course of Douglas has taken us all somewhat by surprise.” He told Lincoln of the responses of some Republicans. “Some of our friends here act like fools in running & flattering Douglas.” Trumbull wrote that Douglas “encourages it & invites such men as Wilson, Seward,” and others “to confer with him & they seem wonderfully pleased to go.” Trumbull did not want Lincoln to take these reports at face value, but to understand that William Seward’s motivation in offering public praise for Douglas was to further fuel the division growing in the Democratic Party. Trumbull assured Lincoln, “I have no sort of idea of making Douglas our leader either here or in Ills. He has done nothing as yet to commend him to any honest Republican.”
This letter revealed Trumbull’s admiration for Lincoln, the man he had defeated for the Senate three years earlier in January 1855. Trumbull concluded by assuring Lincoln that he would work for the election to the Senate “of that Friend who was instrumental in promoting my own.” After he signed his letter, Trumbull added a final sentence. His wife, Julia Jayne Trumbull, who was once one of Mary Lincoln’s dearest friends before the rupture caused by the 1855 Senate race, was sitting by her husband as he completed the letter. She admired Lincoln and told her husband that Lincoln was “too modest to understand whom I mean by ‘that friend.’ ” Heeding his wife’s advice, Trumbull added that Lincoln was the friend “who magnanimously requested his friends just at the right moment to cast their votes for me.”
AS THE WINTER OF 1858 slowly turned into spring, the air began to go out of Douglas’s balloon. Republicans in Illinois increasingly resented the intrusion of Greeley and other eastern Republicans in their affairs. Joseph Medill’s Chicago Press &Tribune fumed, “There seems to be a considerable notion pervading the brains of political wet-nurses at the East, that the barbarians of Illinois cannot take care of themselves.”
To the observant eye, Lincoln’s bid for the Senate, despite the winter panic over Douglas, was coming into focus in the spring for important reasons. First, while being an old-line Whig had hurt Lincoln in his Senate bid in 1855, it was helping him in 1858. Both Governor Bissell and Senator Trumbull were former old-line Democrats. There was a general consensus that it was time to honor an old-line Whig with the other Illinois Senate seat. Second, Lincoln rose to the top of the available former Whigs because of the “sacrifice” of his candidacy three years earlier that had led to the election of Trumbull. Trumbull had personally recognized the debt, but it was also being spoken of by other politicians as well as the editors of Republican newspapers.
In the midst of pressure from eastern Republicans to embrace Doug las, Illinois Republicans came up with a novel idea. Up until this time, the legislature would select the nominee from a variety of candidates. Why not short-circuit that process by holding a convention and agreeing upon only one candidate, whom everyone could then rally around? As German-American leader Gustave Koerner put it, “We must make them understand that Lincoln is our man.” Lincoln endorsed the idea of a convention in an April 24, 1858, letter to Illinois secretary of state Ozias Hatch. “Let us have a state convention in which we can have a full consultation: and till which, let us stand firm, making no committals as to strange and new combinations.” Lincoln, although confident, remembered that he had lost out in 1855 to a new combination, even as some Republicans were still talking about combining with Douglas.
In April, the pace of events quickened. Republican leaders, including William Herndon, who represented Lincoln, met in Chicago and endorsed the idea of holding a convention in Springfield on June 16, 1858.
AS LINCOLN WAS GEARING UP to run for the Senate, he was also exploring an additional career as a public lecturer. He was inspired by the traveling lecturers who began coming to Springfield in the 1850s. Lincoln heard two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s three lectures at the statehouse in January 1853. Bayard Taylor, a renowned world traveler, had lectured on “the Arabs” in 1854, and, by popular demand, returned in 1855 to lecture on Japan, India, and “the Philosophy of Travel.” Other lecturers included Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and New England Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. The biggest crowds turned out to hear (and see) Lola Montez, an actress and dancer, lecture on “Fashion.”
Lincoln decided to try his hand as a homegrown lecturer. On April 6, 1858, Lincoln delivered a lecture on “Discovery and Inventions” in Bloomington. Lincoln’s thesis was that of all the creatures on Earth, man “is the only one who improves his workmanship.” He then traced innumerable inventions and discoveries that were of “peculiar value” because of their “efficiency in facilitating other inventions and discoveries.” As an example, he trumpeted the printing press, which “gave ten thousand copies of any written matter, quite as cheaply as ten were given before. Consequently a thousand minds were brought into the field where there was but one before.”
Lincoln delivered this same lecture again nearly one year later in February 1859, in Jacksonville, Decatur, and Springfield. It demonstrated Lincoln’s commitment to progress, especially his appreciation of the changing arts of communication, although much of his material was cobbled together from Old Testament references and Encyclopedia Americana articles. Despite Lincoln’s personal and political popularity, his general public lectures never caught fire with the small audiences in attendance.
IN THE MONTHS LEADING UP to the Republicans’ June nominating convention, Lincoln turned down all speaking invitations and started the most extensive preparation for any speech he had ever made. Yes, he would be building on all of his speeches since 1854, but this time he decided to write out the speech in its entirety. He wrestled with ideas on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. The Lincoln who returned from Congress in 1849 not knowing if he could ever be elected again, who had been defeated for the Senate in 1855 when he and his friends thought surely he would win, well understood that this was his last opportunity to win election to the Senate, his highest aspiration to public office. Behind closed doors, Lincoln wrote, revised, and edited what he intended to say at the historic state convention.
The evening before the convention, Lincoln shared his speech with a dozen friends. After asking them to sit down at a round table, Lincoln read his entire address slowly. He asked each man for his response “to its wisdom or polity.” One by one each responded. One, unnamed, burst out, a “damned fool utterance.” John Armstrong, a Sangamon County builder, declared that the speech “was too far in advance of the times.” Still another voiced his concern that the speech would “drive away a good many voters fresh from the Democratic ranks.” Only William Herndon, who had heard an earlier version of the speech, offered his affirmation. Armstrong remembered that Herndon, while admitting that perhaps the speech was ahead of its time, urged Lincoln to “lift the people to the level of this Speech.” Lincoln sat silently. He then rose, walked back and forth, and responded, “The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered.” His friends feared the speech would be heard as too radical, but by now Lincoln had learned to trust his own judgment.
JUNE 16, 1858, dawned a “lovely” day in Springfield. Euphoric Republicans, sensing victory in the air, strolled around the state capital in grand spirits. For only the second time in the history of the nation a state convention was gathering to nominate a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Because there were no hard-and-fast rules on credentials, about one thousand delegates poured into Springfield.
The nomination of Lincoln began with the Chicago delegation bringing their banner into the hall as the crowd cheered: “Cook County Is for Abraham Lincoln.” A delegate from Peoria moved that the convention adopt the motto “Illinois Is for Abraham Lincoln.”
“Hurrahs” shook the statehouse. By the close of the afternoon, the editor of the Chicago Journal submitted an endorsement: “Resolved that Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.” The cheers and hurrahs went on and on. Finally, the convention, still in a celebratory mood, adjourned for dinner.
The convention reconvened at eight o’clock. On a terribly warm and humid evening, with not nearly enough chairs to accommodate everyone, the Hall of Representatives became “crowded almost to suffocation.” The angular Lincoln, at age forty-nine, rose and walked the few steps to the table at the front of the hall. He turned to face an audience that suddenly became silent. Although thoroughly prepared, Lincoln had decided to speak without his manuscript. He was, as always in delivering a speech, nervous. He began:
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Lincoln began the most important address of his political career with short brushstrokes, painting the state of affairs of the nation in the middle of 1858. It was “the fifth year” since a “policy was initiated”—the policy was unnamed but everyone present knew it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A “confident promise” had been put forth that there would be an “end to slavery agitation.” The promise had been offered by President Buchanan in his inaugural address fifteen months earlier. The repetition of the word “agitation” conjured up in the imaginations of Lincoln’s listeners the cacophony of events symbolized in “bleeding Kansas.”
As Lincoln painted the problem, the audience grew eager to hear his answer. He offered his solution by switching from an opening “we” to an “In my opinion.” Lincoln told them: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He had quickly reached his thesis sentence. Lincoln declared, by the use of a biblical metaphor drawn from Jesus admonishing the Pharisees (Matthew 12:25), that there was no longer any middle position between slavery and freedom.
As with all of Lincoln’s best ideas, he had worked with this “house divided” metaphor on several occasions stretching back fifteen years. He employed it in a Whig campaign circular in 1843. He put it as a question in his philosophical letter to George Robertson of Transylvania University in 1855. Judge T. Lyle Dickey, who had shared the platform with Lincoln at a speech in Bloomington on September 12, 1856, remembered that he used it on that evening. Whatever its past use, this scriptural image would become the signature theme of this address and the senatorial campaign to follow.
The Bible, for Lincoln, always possessed a present dimension. The invocation of this biblical metaphor pointed beyond itself and allowed him to make several points. First, he declared that the status quo on slavery was no longer acceptable. He qualified this assertion with the historical modifier “permanently.” Lincoln was offering a forecast, but not a timetable, for the future of slavery in America. Second, the logical Lincoln told his audience:
He did “not expect the Union to be dissolved. ”
He did “not expect the house to fall.”
But he did “expect it will cease to be divided.”
In his developing speaking style, Lincoln relished repetition. He twice told the audience what he did not expect. But it was actually the same thought, stated first literally (Union) and then figuratively (house). Telling the audience what he did not expect increased their anticipation for what he did expect. He predicted, boldly, that the nation would cease to be divided.
How would this come to be? Lincoln offered more than one possibility. At first, it might sound as if Lincoln was repeating what he had been saying since 1854, namely that his only goal was to “arrest” the spread of slavery into the territories. Furthermore, Lincoln stated that extinction would follow from restriction. He believed he was saying nothing more than Jefferson had said, but this provocative part of his introduction quickly became open to misunderstanding.
Although Herndon suggested Lincoln wrote the “House Divided” speech in the weeks immediately prior to its delivery, Lincoln had actually laid the foundation of the address seven months before in one of his most extensive private notes. The impetus for the note, about three-quarters as long as the speech itself, may have been the suggestion that Republicans support Douglas for reelection to the Senate in 1858. About three-quarters of the way through his private reflection, Lincoln noted that this “angry agitation” over the extension of slavery was not confined to the political arena. He chose one example to illustrate the growing problem. “Presbyterian assemblies, Methodist conferences, Unitarian gatherings, and single churches to an indefinite extent, are wrangling, and cracking, and going to pieces on the same question.”
He then crafted the idea in a way that would link this private rumination to his future public speech.
I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I expressed this belief a year ago; and subsequent developments have but confirmed me. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new. Do you doubt it? Study the Dred Scott decision, and then see how little even now remains to be done.
In Lincoln’s speech seven months later, some whole sentences are drawn word for word from his extended private note. The major difference between the note and the speech is its rhetorical structure. Whereas Lincoln employed the “house divided” metaphor toward the end of the note, as the culmination of the logic of his thinking, in the speech he moved it up to the beginning, as the thesis that undergirded the specifics that would follow from it.
After Lincoln’s tightly written thesis, he muses about a conspiracy that would make slavery a national institution. He goes into great detail to describe the “working points of that machinery” by employing a house-building analogy that would have been familiar to nearly everyone in his audience: “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James …” Suddenly, dramatically, Lincoln moves from metaphor to naming names. Everyone in the audience knew he was speaking of Senator Stephen Douglas, ex-president Franklin Pierce, Chief Justice Roger Taney, and President James Buchanan. As the audience took in these names, Lincoln completed the scaffolding by hammering in the last nail. “We find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft before the first lick was struck.”
He concluded this section by suggesting that this unholy conspiracy was working toward a second Dred Scott decision “declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” He told his audience that such a result grew from chief carpenter Douglas’s “doctrine of ‘care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up.’ ” Lincoln is arguing that no one should be misled that this controversy is only about the territories. One day people in the North will wake up to discover that the proponents of the Dred Scott decision wish to open the doors to slavery in the supposed free states.
In the third section, still concerned that Douglas might draw off some Republicans in the upcoming election, Lincoln sought to portray Douglas, despite his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, as no friend of the Republican cause. He told his audience he had heard people whisper “softly, that Douglas is the aptest instrument” to oppose that “dynasty” that is the Buchanan administration because “he has regularly voted with us” against the charade of the Lecompton Constitution. These nameless friends “remind us that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones.” At this point, in high drama, with his right arm outstretched, Lincoln thundered, “But ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ ” Here Lincoln was turning again to the Bible, this time quoting from Ecclesiastes 9:4, “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” This ancient Jewish declaration received its meaning from the contrast between the lowest and highest of animals. Lincoln knew he could never claim Doug las’s exalted status, but pointed beyond himself to the exalted cause he served.
He declared that Douglas, despite his popularity, was “a caged and toothless” leader, because he was on the wrong side of the moral issue of slavery. “How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don’t care anything about it.” Popular sovereignty was an empty promise if in the end it had nothing to say about one man owning another man. Resorting to irony, Lincoln identified himself in the phrase “the largest of us are very small ones”—Lincoln may be tall in height but knew he was small in public stature compared to Douglas—but the cause he represented would bring him the victory.
Lincoln’s 3,173-word speech, which took less than thirty minutes to deliver, was actually brief in comparison to the average political addresses of the time. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven words in the opening sentence were one syllable long. He underlined twenty words in the introduction, which he made sure were italicized in the printed text.
With his speech completed, Lincoln gave his text to the young reporter Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, requesting that he take it to the office of the Illinois State Journal. Before White could finish proofreading the speech, Lincoln “came into the composing room … and looked over the revised proof.” He told White he wanted the speech printed exactly as he had delivered it. He was beginning his run for the Senate and intended these ideas to serve as the platform that would lead him to victory.


This photograph at Macomb, Illinois, was taken five days after Lincoln’s first debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa. Photographer T. Painter Pearson asked Lincoln on the morning of August 26, 1858, if he wanted a mirror to “fix up.” He said no. “It would not be much of a likeness if I fixed up any.”