The Lincolns crossed the Ohio River and homesteaded near Little Pigeon Creek in Perry County, Indiana. Their family consisted of Thomas and Nancy, young Abraham, and his older sister Sarah. In a biographical sketch written in 1859, Lincoln recalled the scene: "We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods."
Abraham was put to clearing timber so the land could be farmed. "Abraham though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that time till within his twenty third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument -- less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons."
Lincoln endured a youth of rough conditions, of mind-numbing and muscle-straining manual labor, of prolonged physical exertion that gave him a physique so lean and muscular that doctors performing his post-assassination autopsy remarked upon it.
The perils of frontier life were brought home to the Lincolns in 1818 when the "milk sickness" visited southern Indiana. This illness spread through the milk of cows that had ingested the white snakeroot plant, and its symptoms included nausea, paralysis and eventual death. Nancy Hanks Lincoln was taken ill with it and died on October 5, 1818. Thomas Lincoln fashioned a crude coffin for her and Abraham, at the age of nine, helped bury his mother in a grave near the family cabin.
A year later Thomas married a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, who became a second and much beloved mother to Abraham. But tragedy returned in 1828 when Lincoln's sister Sarah died in childbirth. These two deaths may have affected Lincoln deeply. He had a propensity for fatalism and melancholia that exhibited itself in moody silences, depression and a preference for maudlin poetry like William Knox's "Mortality."
As a youth, Lincoln received little formal education at so-called ABC schools. "There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education," Lincoln remembered. He was largely a self-educated man, all the more remarkable given his command of the English language. His time occupied with farm labor, Lincoln's father kept him constantly on the axe or the plow, and would hire Abraham out to neighbors as a day laborer and pocket the wages. One scholar has suggested that Lincoln's lifelong aversion to slavery may date from the frustration of working entirely for the benefit of another man - his father.
By 1830 Lincoln's restless father was ready to move again, and the family migrated to Illinois. Lincoln was then twenty-one years old. Lincoln biographer Albert J. Beveridge was not impressed with the young Lincoln: "it is clear that the Lincoln of youth, early and middle manhood showed few signs of the Lincoln of the second inaugural." Indeed, Lincoln was a crude frontier youth who gave little sign of future accomplishments.
After the Lincoln family's 1830 departure from Indiana, Abraham Lincoln helped clear timber for his father's latest farm in Macon County, Illinois, near Decatur. He was increasingly restless and ready to be on his own. An early demonstration of Lincoln's desire for independence from parental guidance, and of his interest in politics, came in 1830 when he gave an impromptu speech in favor of improving the Sangamon River that flowed through Springfield. He also traveled to New Orleans twice by flatboat, in 1828 and 1831, carrying farm products to market, and he may have witnessed the indignities of slavery on the trips.
Lincoln broke forever free from his father in 1831 when he moved to New Salem, Illinois. Clad in primitive homsespun clothing and rudely educated, Lincoln seemed an unlikely prospect for success. He clerked at a general store and did various odd jobs to earn his keep. His humble origins aside, Lincoln began to stand out because he possessed two qualities highly prized on the frontier: immense strength and a gift for wit and humorous storytelling. Lincoln demonstrated the former trait in a famous wrestling match with a local tough and the latter around the general store. He continued what would be a lifelong process of self-education, taking grammar lessons and reading Shakespeare.
In 1832 Lincoln put his popularity in his adopted hometown to the test, running for the Illinois General Assembly. He declared his candidacy in a March 1832 statement in which he pledged to support internal improvements and education. The young Lincoln proclaimed that his ambition was to be "truly esteemed of my fellow men," and he closed on a characteristically lugubrious note. Lincoln pledged to do his utmost to repay the voters' favor if they conferred it upon him, "But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me
A bit of the elusive popular favor came to Lincoln in April when Illinois Governor John Reynolds called out the militia, heralding the advent of the Black Hawk War. Lincoln was elected captain of the New Salem militia company, and he recalled in 1859 that this honor "gave me more pleasure than any I have had since."
The Black Hawk War was a disgraceful episode that began when Black Hawk leader of a band of some 500 Sac and Fox Indians, crossed the Mississippi River from Iowa and returned to ancestral lands near Rock Island, Illinois. The band had earlier been forced across the river by violent land squatters, and were compelled to return by hunger and the desire to plant corn on tribal lands in Illinois. Their appearance led to skirmishes, a general panic, and the militia call-up.
The Indians had little chance. They were driven into Wisconsin, cornered, and many slaughtered in an unequal conflict called the Battle of Bad Axe. Lincoln never saw action, and he mustered out in July, in time to return for the August elections in New Salem. Lincoln was defeated in that contest, placing eighth out of thirteen contestants vying for four seats.
Lincoln tried his hand as a merchant, briefly co-owning a general store in New Salem, only to see the venture fail. Friends secured his appointment as town postmaster, and as deputy surveyor of Sangamon County. Lincon kept himself barely solvent, and in 1834 he again declared for the state legislature. He had made a deep enough impression on his district to win this time around.
Wearing a new suit that was the best item of clothing he had ever owned, Lincoln arrived in the state capital of Vandalia on a blustery November day in 1834. The twenty-five year old freshman representative proved himself a solid Whig, voting for a state bank and in favor of the massive Illinois and Michigan Canal project. He became a consistent supporter of such internal improvements, a Whig article of faith.
Lincoln soon demonstrated his wit and humor again. When the legislature mistakenly appointed a man to a surveyor post that was filled, Lincoln suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that the redundant appointment stand so that no action would be necessary should the incumbent surveyor conclude to die. He became a favorite for his agile mind, though he was more follower than leader at this stage of his political career. Appointed to twelve special committees, Lincoln drafted bills and resolutions for his fellow Whigs, and was elected to a second term in 1836.
John T. Stuart, a fellow Whig, encouraged Lincoln to study law. At first intimidated at this prospect, witnessing crude court and legislative proceedings convinced Lincoln that his imperfect education was not a bar to the profession. He embarked on a legal career, vigorously studying the standard texts of the era like Blackstone's Commentaries, and rejecting the subsistence farming his father pursued.
Life on the farm held no attraction for Lincoln. Politically, too, he had rejected the Jeffersonian vision of an ever-expanding agrarian idyll composed of virtuous subsistence farmers. He believed, like many Whigs, in the prospect of developing the country's existing space, its industry and its transportation network, rather than continuing to acquire new territory.
In this period Lincoln reinforced his place in politics and society. He won re-election to the Illinois legislature in August, 1836, and was granted his law license in September of that year.
The Sangamon County delegation to the 1836-37 legislative session became known as the "Long Nine" because of their pronounced height. They shared a commitment to moving the state capital from its present location in Vandalia to Springfield. With the population of northern and central Illinois growing, many wished for a less remote seat of state government. While Lincoln and the Sangamon delegation were primarily occupied with anointing Springfield as the next state capital, an internal improvements craze gripped the state, that is, a desire for state-sponsored canals, railroads, and bridges. Internal improvement conventions were held that summer in the counties, and they passed resolutions demanding improvements, and sent delegates to a state convention that met in Vandalia as the legislature opened. The assembled representatives got the message. They approved a massive internal improvements package, totaling some $10 million, a spectacular amount for developing Illinois.
Lincoln led the effort to move the capital. He proposed shrewd amendments to the bill that relocated the capital, including one that required the designated city to contribute $50,000 and two acres to the state, a stipulation that eliminated small communities from contention. When the bill seemed lost, Lincoln gathered his colleagues together and sent them out to lobby wavering members. The bill revived, and in the end Springfield supplanted Vandalia as the Illinois capital.
Lincoln also backed internal improvements, but he was not a principal mover of the Whig bills. Indeed, it was
Stephen A. Douglas, a Morgan County representative and rising Democratic star, who introduced resolutions calling for railroads that crisscrossed Illinois and other internal improvements. Lincoln and the Sangamon delegation were later accused of trading votes for internal improvements in exchange for votes for Springfield as the new capital. Vote trading often took the form of a process called logrolling. Modern scholarship is divided on whether there was any logrolling in this instance, yet even if there was, it should not necessarily be condemned. Balancing interests by trading votes for disparate pieces of legislation is one of democracy's messier, but unavoidable legislative tools.
Grand internal improvements passed only to founder on the rocks of the Panic of 1837, an economic depression that ravaged the credit of the State of Illinois, greatly reducing the value of its bonds. None of the magnificent projects funded by those bonds was ever realized by the state, and Illinois did not retire the debt incurred until 1887.
A movement to abolish slavery began in earnest in the 1830s, led by committed activists such as William Lloyd Garrison. The effort was at first wildly unpopular. Many Americans considered the abolitionists Constitution-wreckers and zealots bent on disrupting the sectional harmony essential to the Union. An anti-abolition backlash swept the nation that had an extreme manifestation in Illinois when abolitionist newspaper editor was murdered by an Alton mob in 1837.
Southern state legislatures carried resolutions urging their northern counterparts to suppress the abolitionists. Such pleas received a sympathetic hearing in Illinois, which had been settled predominantly by southerners and tolerated slavery within its borders in various guises. In response to southern entreaties, the Illinois legislature adopted resolutions in 1837 condemning the abolition movement. In his first public stand against slavery, Lincoln opposed the resolutions in the legislature.
Two years later, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in public debates on the issues at stake in the pending presidential election. A precursor of their famous 1858 exchanges, the two traded barbs over Martin Van Buren's presidency, the subtreasury, and the abolition movement. To rebut Douglas's contention that the Whigs supported the abolitionists, Lincoln discovered that Van Buren had voted to allow a limited degree of black suffrage in New York, a fact that incensed Douglas when Lincoln confronted him with it.
Lincoln's use of the black suffrage issue against Douglas illustrates the limits of his views on African-Americans. While he condemned slavery, Lincoln was, at this point in his career, unwilling of advocate black suffrage, and indeed, not shy about using the issue in anti-black Illinois. Lincoln stumped tirelessly for the Harrison-Tyler ticket, and although the Whigs failed to carry Illinois, they won the presidency and Lincoln enhanced his political reputation.
Lincoln married Mary Todd on November 4, 1842, after a rather tempestuous courtship that included an unpleasant break-up. Raised in Lexington, Kentucky, Mary came to live with her sister Elizabeth in Springfield in 1839, gaining instant admission into the prominent social circle around her brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, son of an Illinois governor. Soon she met Lincoln and their rocky courtship followed. While the marriage is often characterized as stormy, it had a calming effect on Lincoln. He had suffered debilitating mood swings, periods of depression that left him incapable of work and desperate for relief. "Things I can not account for, have conspired and have gotten my spirits so low, that I feel that I would rather be any place in the world, than here," Lincoln wrote from Vandalia during one legislative session.
Marriage alleviated the worst manifestations of depression in Lincoln's behavior, but he remained subject to bouts of melancholia throughout his life. His law partner William H. Herndon described Lincoln as "a sad-looking man; his malncholy dripped from him as he walked.... The perpetual look of sadness was his most prominent feature."
As Lincoln's fourth and final term in the state legislature came to a close in 1841, he sought out greater political prominence and challenges. Illinois was a solidly Democratic state though; there was little prospect for an aspiring Whig politician to win statewide office. Whigs had a majority only in Illinois' Seventh Congressional District, which included Lincoln's Sangamon County. To keep peace within the party, Seventh District Whigs agreed that the seat should be rotated among aspirants. Lincoln's rivals and friends John J. Hardin and Edward D. Baker both served a term before Lincoln's turn came in 1846.
Nominated by the Whigs on May 1, 1846, Lincoln's opponent was Democrat Peter Cartwright, an itinerant Methodist preacher who was popular in the district. Lincoln and Cartwright had clashed before. Cartwright had bested Lincoln for the state legislature in 1832, and Lincoln had skewered Cartwright in an anonymous newspaper article in 1834. A frontier preacher and staunch Jacksonian Democrat, Cartwright annoyed Whigs by boasting that he could turn Methodists out to the polls to vote Democratic. He now spread the rumor that Lincoln was an "infidel," or someone who did not believe in the existence of God. Lincoln complained that Cartwright "never heard me utter a word in any way indicating my opinions on religious matters, in his life," yet presumed to speak authoritatively on his religious faith. Lincoln felt obliged to respond with a July 31, 1846 handbill denying the charges. Cartwright's gambit did him no good as Lincoln easily bested him in the election, held August 3, 1846.
Lincoln's handbill gives some insight into his religious opinions. As a young man, Lincoln imbibed the rationalism of Enlightenment philosophers. He may have written an antireligious tract that friends burned to avoid later embarrassment. Lincoln never belonged to a church though he read the Bible, and biblical imagery decorates his speeches and prose. In an 1838 speech, Lincoln contended that "Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason," was "our future support and defense." In his 1846 handbill, Lincoln admitted that he was not a church member, but claimed he had "never denied the truth of the Scriptures," nor had been disrespectful of any religion. He confessed that when younger he had privately argued in favor of a Doctrine of Necessity but had not advocated that doctrine for five years. Lincoln defined the Doctrine of Necessity as "the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control," and he contended that this fatalism with predestinarian overtones was part of certain Christian faiths, an assertion that sought to demystify it. He concluded with a flat claim that he could never support an atheist for political office. Lincoln later grew more religious or at least sympathetic to religion under the impact of the deaths of his sons Edward and William, and the suffering of the Civil War.
These issues came to the fore during a period of intense religious upheaval in the United States. Beginning in the 1830s, traveling evangelists like Charles Grandison Finney and Peter Cartwright had encouraged American Protestants into a national revival movement that became known as the Second Great Awakening. This movement gave rise to a number of important reform efforts, including sabbatarianism, temperance, education reform, and abolitionism. Reform groups often organized in voluntary associations and sponsored lectures, published handbills, and agitated for political action. Many of these groups provided women with indirect political influence, especially over matters of hearth and home. In the 1840s northeastern Whigs often became these groups' political spokesmen. Together with an emphasis upon economic development, moral reform became a staple of the Whig political program.
The Second Great Awakening's Protestant surge toward activism and moral reform often brought along darker aspects as well. The belief that American society could be purified more than once led to movements to banish supposedly unwholesome elements. With the advent of widespread immigration in the 1830s, many native-born Protestants sought to exclude Catholic immigrants from citizenship.
The Mormons elicited a similar response. In 1840 the sect, followers of the upstate New York prophet Joseph Smith, arrived in western Illinois and began to build the city of Nauvoo on the principles of their faith. Nauvoo quickly became the largest city in the state of Illinois, and the Mormons' iconoclastic faith and considerable political and economic influence quickly won them rivals and enemies in the surrounding counties. Wherever they had settled, Mormons had organized themselves and voted as a bloc. Often this behavior unseated local political leadership and earned long-lasting enmity. Mormons' practice of polygamy also outraged Protestant morality. In 1844 these simmering disputes boiled over into violence as anti-Mormon forces murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. The so-called Mormon War covered western Illinois with religious bloodshed, and set the importance of religion in sharp relief.
Like the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements that flourished in this period, the Mormon conflict of 1844 advertised many Protestant crusaders' intolerance and belligerence.
The Mexican War dominated Lincoln's brief congressional career. In 1846 President James K. Polk, a Tennessee Democrat, ordered General Zachary Taylor's army to advance to the Rio Grande River. Mexico had never recognized the United States' 1845 annexation of Texas, and skirmishes followed the arrival of Taylor's force. Lincoln opposed the resulting war, which he thought a contest Polk provoked as a vote-getting device, and he hoped his arguments against the war would make his reputation in the United States House of Representatives.
Lincoln contended that the disputed territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande only belonged to Texas where her jurisdiction had been clearly established, and he did not think it extended to the Rio Grande. "It is a fact, that the United States Army, in marching to the Rio Grande, marched into a peaceful Mexican settlement, and frightened the inhabitants away from their homes and their growing crops," Lincoln said. In his "Spot" resolutions of 1847, he called on Polk for proof of the president's insistence that the war began when Mexicans shed American blood on American soil "That soil was not ours; and Congress did not annex or attempt to annex it." Lincoln voted for a resolution that declared the war unnecessary and accused Polk of violating the Constitution in commencing it. He nonetheless voted to supply the American army and he did not support legislation that would have prohibited acquiring territory from Mexico as part of a peace settlement.
Lincoln's law partner William Herndon condemned his opposition to the war, and other Illinois Whigs expressed similar reservations. Democrats derided his course, referring to him as "Spotty" Lincoln, and there is no doubt that Illinois supported the war. Still, questions have been raised over how much Lincoln's antiwar stand cost him politically. Mark Neely argued that Illinois Whigs agreed with Lincoln, and his refusal to run for another term merely reflected the Whigs' rotation policy. Lincoln backed Zachary Taylor's successful campaign for president and hoped to be rewarded with an appointment as commissioner of the General Land Office, only to lose it to another candidate.
The issue of slavery arose while Lincoln was in Congress, as the new territories acquired from Mexico reopened sectional wounds. Lincoln's congressional voting record opposed slavery, though he exhibited more moderation than abolitionists like Joshua Giddings. Lincoln voted against the "gag rule" that peremptorily tabled citizens' antislavery petitions to Congress, he presented citizens' appeals for the end of slavery in Washington, D.C., and he supported David Wilmot's proviso that outlawed slavery in territory acquired from Mexico.
Lincoln crafted a proposal to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia through a local referendum and compensated emancipation. In essence, Lincoln was inclined to leave slavery alone in the South, out of a desire to placate southern opinion and trusting to its eventual extinction, but he firmly opposed its extension into new territory. He stated: "I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death."
With the conclusion of his sole term in the U.S. Congress, Lincoln returned to the practice of law. The historian Michael Burlingame has argued that Lincoln, who was now in his early forties, experienced a mid-life crisis at this time, a painful search for self-identity that resulted in the discovery of his true gifts. The crisis lasted from 1849 to 1854, a period that Albert Beveridge described as "five desolate years" crowned with a dramatic speech condemning the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an effort that resurrected Lincoln's political career.
Lincoln embraced his law practice with great earnestness and retired from politics. When a Whig newspaper touted him for Congress in 1850 he declined the summons. Instead, Lincoln traveled the fourteen counties of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, scrounging up cases, small for the most part, land disputes, quarrels over livestock, debt collections, divorces, and occasional murders. Twice each year Lincoln left Springfield to spend weeks with Judge David Davis and other lawyers as they trooped from county seat to county seat. Conditions were primitive. Roads were little more than game trails, rivers and streams had to be forded as there were no bridges, and the roving band often saw deer, quail and even wolves roaming the lush prairie.
Davis, Lincoln and the other attorneys would arrive in town and settle in at a primitive tavern that doubled as a hotel. The lodgings were usually crude, the men sometimes shared beds, and the food was uniformly miserable. "This thing of traveling in Illinois, and being eaten up by bed bugs and mosquitoes... is not what it is cracked up to be," complained David Davis. Lincoln was considered remarkable for his indifference to the hardships of bed and table. "He never complained of any food - nor beds - nor lodgings - He once Said at a table - `Well -- in the absence of anything to Eat I will jump into this Cabbage," Davis remembered.
Lincoln's gift for storytelling and humor made him a popular and even beloved companion in this exclusively masculine world. Judge Davis said "In my opinion, Lincoln was happy, as happy as he could be, when on this circuit - and happy no other place." He formed lasting friendships with men who became strong supporters of his political aspirations: David Davis, Leonard Swett, Ward Hill Lamon.
Lincoln brooded a great deal over what he thought was his lack of success. At times he withdrew from the conviviality of his circuit colleagues, drew a chair before the fireplace, and stared abstractly at the flames for hours. At these times his friends, recognizing the mood, would leave him to his thoughts. He had hoped for political success, but that world seemed to have passed him by while rivals like Stephen A. Douglas had achieved considerable notice. The death of his son Edward "Eddie" at the age of three in 1850 and the death of his father Thomas in 1851 added to the gloom. Happily, two more sons were born in this period, William and Thomas, but Lincoln's long sojourns on the circuit kept him away from his wife and the boys. He missed them terribly. "Lincoln speaks very affectionately of his wife and children. He is a very warm hearted man," David Davis wrote his wife.
While Lincoln retreated to Illinois, the American political system faced a mounting crisis. The acquisition of Mexican lands pressed the question of slavery to the forefront of national politics. Would these lands, once organized as territories and states, permit slavery? How would their organization affect the delicate sectional balance in Congress?
Northerners promptly insisted upon slavery's exclusion from the new West. In 1846 the Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot attached a famous proviso barring the introduction of slavery in the Mexican Cession into a military appropriations bill. The Wilmot Proviso split the Congress along sectional lines that often superseded party affiliations. Each time a bill to organize the western territories came up, northern representatives attached the Proviso to it, ensuring its defeat in the southern-controlled Senate. Eventually southerners led by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina drew up their own program, which held that slavery could not be excluded anywhere in the American Union.
The Mexican War Hero Zachary Taylor swept the Whig Party to the presidency in 1848, but Taylor's studied silence on the sectional question failed to resolve that issue. After a prolonged deadlock that even prevented the organization of the Congress (it took three weeks and fifty-nine ballots to elect a Speaker of the House), the Congress hammered out the Compromise of 1850. After fruitless appeals by the aged Whigs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster failed to pacify the South, Illinois' own Stephen Douglas facilitated the passage of a set of measures that seemed to preserve the sectional balance.
The Compromise admitted California as a free state and banned the slave trade in the District of Columbia, both victories for northerners opposed to slavery's expansion. Southerners celebrated a stronger fugitive slave law that obliged northerners to return runaways to their southern masters, and a promise that there would be no congressional prohibition of slavery in the New Mexico and Utah territories. This last provision turned to the fundamental Democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty, or passing the responsibility for political decisions to local electorates.
Americans greeted the Compromise with enthusiastic celebrations, and many believed that the Union had been saved. But the Compromise merely evaded the major issues of slavery in the territories. Northerners and southerners interpreted the Compromise in different ways, and their interpretations quickly led to renewed conflict. Did the organization of the Utah and New Mexico territories without a congressional prohibition of slavery mean that new settlers could hold slaves there until a state constitution articulated a position on slavery? Or could residents of a territory exclude slavery even before they attained statehood?
Back in Illinois, Lincoln continued his lifelong course of self-study. He took up Euclid, carrying the books with him as he traveled the circuit. William Herndon recalled that Lincoln read a great deal, particularly about politics. He had embarked on a self-motivated course of improvement, of deep thinking on the issues of the day, bringing his formidable intellect to bear. Douglas Wilson noted "Perhaps the quality most remarked in his mental makeup by those who knew him, apart from his melancholy, was the logical cast of Lincoln's mind." He brought these gifts to bear in the courtroom and enjoyed marked success. A Danville newspaper characterized Lincoln's legal gifts in 1851: "He lives but to ponder, reflect and cogitate.... In his examination of witnesses, he displays a masterly ingenuity... that baffled concealment and defies deceit. And in addressing a jury, there is no false glitter, no sickly sentimentalism to be discovered... Bold, forcible and energetic, he forces conviction upon the mind, and by his clearness and conciseness, stamps it there, not to be erased."
When Lincoln finally emerged from his political hiatus, his course of self-improvement and innate intellectual abilities enabled him to construct a vigorous counter-argument to Stephen A. Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty, an argument he proclaimed, in Michael Burlingame's phrase, "with Euclidian coherence."
Abraham Lincoln emerged from his self-imposed political retirement in 1854 soon after the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law. In that act Illinois' Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas had attempted to organize the vast Nebraska territory for settlement and the passage of a transcontinental railroad. The region in question had been considered a vast desert and had consequently been consigned to the Indians. With settlement west of the Mississippi River, it became clear that the territory was not a desert, but was suitable for farming. Pressure, especially the desire for a transcontinental railroad connecting California and Oregon to the Union, grew to permit settlement whatever the cost to the Indians.
The railroad became a sectional issue, with South and North competing for its terminus. Douglas sought to make Chicago the railroad's eastern hub, and needed to organize the lands west of it in order to pave the way for such a northern route. To placate southern congressmen, he made two damaging concessions. Slavery had long been prohibited in Nebraska because it lay above the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes latitude set by the Missouri Compromise. Douglas agreed to an explicit repeal of that prohibition, opening the territory to slavery. He also agreed to split the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas framed the bill with the idea that the people of Nebraska and Kansas should decide for themselves whether they wished to permit slavery, a doctrine he called "popular sovereignty." He hoped that local control could remove slavery from the national political stage, where it had become a disruptive issue. In this form, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress and was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce.
Douglas' hopes for national political peace were dashed, as the repeal of the Missouri Compromise excited widespread indignation and opposition in the North. Douglas was burned in effigy across the North and shouted down when he attempted to speak before a crowd in Chicago. The act also roused Abraham Lincoln by paving the way for the extension of slavery, a prospect he had long opposed.
Lincoln laid out his objections to the Act and resurrected his political career in a brilliant speech at Peoria on October 16, 1854. In it he vigorously attacked the repeal of the Missouri Compromise line, noting that restricting slavery above that geographical boundary had been a southern concession to match northerners' accession to allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. Now that concession had been inexplicably withdrawn, and with it, the sixty year old policy of restricting the expansion of slavery. Lincoln invoked the founding fathers, specifically Thomas Jefferson, as he contended that the Sage of Monticello had originated the restriction of slavery with his Northwest Ordinance's prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territories.
Lincoln criticized popular sovereignty, questioning how it was that this doctrine could supersede the famed Northwest Ordinance and the sacred Missouri Compromise. Congress had purchased the territory, yet under Douglas' reasoning, it had no control over the disposition of slavery there. The entire nation was interested in the slavery issue, and properly so. Lincoln dismissed arguments that climate and geography rendered slavery impossible in Kansas and Nebraska. Only an explicit statutory prohibition was a true guarantee.
Most importantly, Lincoln attacked the morality of slavery's extension and of slavery itself, while tempering this assault on the "peculiar institution" with moderate rhetoric toward the South. Douglas's contentions were perfectly acceptable if the black man (Lincoln used the archaic term "Negro") were no different than a hog. But Lincoln argued for the humanity of the slaves. They were people, not animals, and consequently possessed certain natural rights. "If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that `all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another." Still, Lincoln attached no blame to the South for slavery, and confessed that he was not ready to accept black social and political equality. Though he strongly condemned any extension of slavery, he was still willing to tolerate even that to preserve the Union. Despite the radical nature of some of his statements, Lincoln was still a Whig, not an abolitionist.
Lincoln's speech was a success. The historian Mark Neely contended that by linking moral condemnation of slavery with appeals to the founding fathers, Lincoln legitimated the oft-criticized antislavery movement. Lincoln biographer David Donald called the effort "a remarkable address, more elevated in sentiment and rhetoric than any speech Lincoln had previously made." Because Lincoln had spoken immediately after , who was touring Illinois to explain and defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he began to be thought of as Douglas's political foe.
Lincoln was drafted to run for the state legislature in 1854, which he reluctantly agreed to do in the hope of assisting the congressional candidate for his district. He won handily, but immediately resigned to contest for a U.S. Senate seat, then decided by the Illinois General Assembly. The anti-Nebraska forces had won the General Assembly in 1854 but they were a queer political mix of Whigs, Democrats who had broken with Douglas over Kansas-Nebraska, and "Know Nothings." The latter party had formed in response to perceptions that the country was being overrun with immigrants, many of whom were Catholic in faith. Thus it was an essentially bigoted, anti-immigrant party seeking to protect old-line protestants' prerogatives and power. The old Whig party had broken down after the 1852 election, riven by insoluble sectional tensions. These disparate political groups were united in a common distaste for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They squabbled over the Senate appointment, and Lincoln was forced to throw his support behind the anti-Nebraska Democrat Lyman Trumbull.
Bitterly disappointed, Lincoln gravitated toward the new Republican Party, the abolitionist faction of the anti-Nebraska coalition. Lincoln sought to draw other anti-Nebraska political groups into the Republican Party, especially former Whigs, former Democrats, and Know-Nothings. On May 29, 1854, a convention of these factions met at Bloomington. They united in opposition to the extension of slavery. Lincoln gave another grand speech, the exact words of which have been lost, but fragmentary accounts suggest he urged the political fusion of those who opposed slavery's extension and the slave power.
Despite his disappointment at losing the Senate seat, Lincoln had found a new political organization comprised of like-minded activists, and become one of its leaders. He campaigned aggressively for the Republican ticket in 1856.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act reignited sectional tensions by opening free territory to slavery. The free-soil North and the proslavery South competed for dominance of the new Kansas territory, a competition that turned violent. When Democratic President James Buchanan accepted the proslavery Lecompton constitution for Kansas in order to placate an increasingly strident South, Stephen Douglas broke ranks with him and the Democratic party. The people of Kansas had rejected the Lecompton constitution and slavery in a referendum, and Douglas declared that to accept it in spite of that negative verdict would be a violation of popular sovereignty. He helped defeat the Lecompton constitution in Congress. Douglas had thus traveled a strange path from opening territory to the slaveholding South in 1854, to standing against slavery's expansion into that same territory. His stand effectively split the Democratic Party.
Douglas's successful leadership of the anti-Lecompton effort prompted some prominent members of the infant Republican party, Horace Greeley for example, to urge support for Douglas's 1858 re-election bid. Abraham Lincoln coveted the Illinois seat in the United States Senate, and he and other Illinois Republicans were anxious that the party not endorse the partisan Democrat with whom they had struggled for many years. In their view, Douglas was the man who caused the ongoing sectional strife when he abandoned the sacred Missouri Compromise. Lincoln argued against any alliance with Douglas, saying "let us all stand firm, making no committals as to strange and new combinations." In June, 1858, Illinois Republicans met in convention and nominated Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so neither Douglas nor Lincoln appeared on the ballot in the subsequent election.
Lincoln delivered his memorable "House Divided" speech at the convention, dramatically declaring that the "government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." He sought to make clear that real differences separated Republicans and Douglas, thereby implicitly rebuking those who had wished to endorse the Little Giant's candidacy. Lincoln advanced arguments that he would recall in the ensuing debates. He sketched a conspiracy theory that had Douglas acting in concert with Franklin Pierce, Roger Taney, and James Buchanan to make slavery legal everywhere in the United States. The Kansas-Nebraska Act that Douglas rammed through Congress and Pierce signed repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened free territory to slavery. Taney's Dred Scott decision gave slaveholders constitutional protection to bring their slave property into the territories. Buchanan sought to foist a proslavery constitution on the new state of Kansas. These men were doing the bidding of the dread "Slave Power." Lincoln suggested the next logical step would be a Supreme Court decision permitting slavery anywhere in the United States.
Lincoln also contended that Douglas's professed ambivalence as to whether slavery was accepted or rejected by a territory exercising popular sovereignty was in effect an endorsement of slavery's indefinite continuance and nationalization. By contrast, Republicans recognized slavery was wrong, wished to prevent its extension, and thereby placed it on a "course of ultimate extinction."
In the ensuing campaign, Lincoln challenged Douglas to debate the issues, and the Little Giant, the more well known of the two, reluctantly agreed. Seven debates were scheduled: Ottawa, August 21; Freeport, August 27; Jonesboro, September 15; Charleston, September 18; Galesburg, October 7; Quincy, October 13, and Alton, October 15. The debates consisted of a one hour opening speech, an hour and a half answer, and a half hour rebuttal, with the two men alternating the privilege of opening and closing. The contests drew immense crowds for the time, as thousands gathered underneath the prairie sky to listen as two political titans traded rhetorical thrusts and parries.
Douglas vigorously supported his policy of popular sovereignty as a way to remove slavery from the divisive national stage to the local level where democracy was at its most immediate and best. Robert Johannsen has argued that Douglas believed passionately in self-government, the right of the people directly affected to decide for themselves the issue at hand. Douglas accused Lincoln of fomenting civil war with his "house divided" language, and suggested that Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican War was unpatriotic. He played to the prevailing racism of Illinois in the most heavy-handed manner, suggesting that Lincoln was an abolitionist seeking social and political equality for African-Americans. Lincoln had suggested that black Americans were included in the Declaration of Independence's famed assertion that all men were created equal. To this, Douglas declared, "I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever." Having denied the essential humanity of black Americans, Douglas affirmed that the government "was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever." Blacks could never be citizens and slavery could exist forever.
Douglas's race card forced Lincoln on the defensive in anti-black Illinois, and he devoted time in the debates to denying that he supported black social and political equality. He reaffirmed though, his belief in black humanity, that black Americans were included in the Declaration of Independence. "There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man." This strong acknowledgment of the black man's humanity undermined the fundamental prop of the slave system, that the slaves were somehow less than human. Lincoln returned again and again to the conspiracy charge he had laid out in the House Divided speech, that Douglas's policies would lead to the perpetuation of slavery, its nationalization, and that Douglas was collaborating with others to bring about this result.
When the votes were tallied, the Democrats had an edge in the Illinois General Assembly, and Douglas was re-elected to the United States Senate. Lincoln was disconsolate. "I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten," he lamented to a friend. But his spirited attacks on popular sovereignty and his evocation of the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence to condemn slavery had struck a chord in the North. His national reputation was made, and he would not be forgotten.
In 1859 Abraham Lincoln reluctantly returned to the practice of law, which quickly proved far less exciting than rhetorical combat with Stephen A. Douglas. Despite his electoral setback, Lincoln remained a leading Republican spokesman, and he continued to maintain "that slavery is wrong and ought to be dealt with as wrong" as a bedrock Republican principle. For his part, the victorious Stephen A. Douglas continued to present popular sovereignty as the best solution to the slavery question in American politics.
Both men agreed to campaign for their respective parties in Ohio prior to the 1859 elections, and while they did not make joint apperances as they had in 1858, they in essence continued their debates. Speaking in Columbus, Dayton, Hamilton and Cincinnati, Lincoln ridiculed popular sovereignty, which he characterized "as a principle,... if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object." Lincoln declared that Douglas's professed indifference to slavery would lead inexorably to its nationalization, and that Douglas' anti-black rhetoric was preparing the public mind for such an outcome by dehumanizing the slaves. Further, Lincoln worried that as slavery spread, thanks to Douglas, free labor would find itself at a competitive disadvantage.
Lincoln's dramatic performance in 1858, and the positive reaction to his 1859 efforts, sparked speculation on his prospects as a presidential nominee in 1860. Lincoln was well aware of his limitations and initially was inclined to dismiss talk of his candidacy. His qualifications seemed dubious - he had failed to be elected senator twice of late, had never held a significant government administrative post, had served only a single term in the House of Representatives, had scant formal education and no web of national political contacts.
Nonetheless, other candidates had their own problems, and Lincoln decided to take some measures to move the possibility of his candidacy forward. He had the 1858 debates collected and published, prepared a campaign autobiography, and accepted an invitation to speak in New York City. The latter effort, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan on February 27, 1860, was a personal and political triumph that prompted many in the East to begin thinking seriously of Lincoln as a potential president. The speech covered familiar ground, condemning popular sovereignty and urging Republicans not to compromise on their opposition to the extension of slavery. After the Cooper Union success, Lincoln toured New England, giving speeches to some acclaim.
On May 10, 1860, a united Illinois Republican Party chose Lincoln as its presidential candidate, dubbing him the "Rail Splitter," a nickname that harkened to Lincoln's humble frontier origins. The Republican National Convention subsequently turned to Lincoln after the supporters of William H. Seward of New York, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania and Edward Bates of Missouri failed to resolve their differences.
The Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings, and each faction chose its own presidential candidate, Stephen A. Douglas for the northerners and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for the southrons. A third party candidate, John Bell, emerged to represent conservatives, mostly former Whigs, who were dissatisfied with the other parties.
The campaign of 1860 proved to be the most spectacular of the century. The deepening sectional crisis dominated public debate. Four candidates brought their diverse appeals to the voting public, yet none managed to forge a broad coalition from a badly fractured electorate.
Lincoln focused his campaign on the northern and western states, and rightly considered himself persona non grata in the slaveholding South. Breckinridge similarly built upon a strong base in the southern states, but was widely reviled in the North. Bell spoke for his core constituency of aging Whigs and other conservatives who believed the sectional crisis would go away if they merely ignored it. Douglas meanwhile exhausted himself by taking the unprecedented step of delivering campaign addresses on his own behalf. In this era candidates themselves maintained a dignified silence while party stump speakers delivered their message to the voters on the local level.
Douglas toured both the North (where he was a popular candidate) and the South (where fevered southern-rights advocates increasingly viewed his doctrine of popular sovereignty as a betrayal of their demands). Vainly Douglas argued that he was the only national candidate and the candidate able to avoid disunion.
Both Breckinridge and Douglas Democrats mounted a withering attack on the Republican Party's perceived advocacy of African-American social and political equality. One Democratic newspaper argued that if Lincoln was elected "hundreds of thousands" of fugitive slaves would immediately "emigrate to their friends - the Republicans - (in the) North, and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men." Other attacks employed graphic racial slurs to cow northern voters. Many Republicans found these sorts of attacks compelling, and local Republican organizations across the North often downplayed slavery as a moral issue and returned to attacks upon the familiar "slave power."
The antebellum political system's participatory pageantry reached its apex with the campaign of 1860. Close electoral competition obliged the parties to rely upon high voter turnout to secure elections. In an era before mass media politics, the parties relied upon stump speakers and mass publications like campaign song books to inspire partisan picnics, parades and rallies. These events often provided the faithful with free food and drink, served to whip up party fervor, and encouraged voter turnout.
Republicans marshalled their armies of electoral activists, many of them young men organized into groups known as "Wide Awakes." Clad in oilcloths and caps, the Wide Awakes mounted a succession of torchlight parades which took Lincoln's message to the streets. Here they often met up with Democratic flying squadrons and other rivals.
When the dust settled, Lincoln was elected president with a mere thirty-nine percent of the vote. He carried no state south of the Mason-Dixon line.
After his victory Lincoln refrained from commenting on the secession crisis. But southern leaders interpreted Lincoln's victory as the final repudiation of their rights, and organized a secession movement. As southern states left the Union one by one, the president-elect remained mute. Privately he resisted compromise efforts that would have permitted any extension of slavery. Reinstating the Missouri Compromise line, for example, and extending it to the Pacific Ocean, would necessarily have given over some territory to slavery. That Lincoln would not countenance.
Lincoln remained hopeful that southern Unionists, i.e., those in the South devoted to Union, would reassert themselves as they had done in earlier sectional crises and restore their states to the Union. But this faith was misplaced. With a few notable exceptions, southerners united behind secession.
Lincoln departed his beloved Springfield on February 11, 1861, pausing in the railroad depot to deliver a short farewell address. Conscious of the unprecented situation, he said, "I go to assume a task more difficult than that which has devolved upon General Washington." He felt great sadness at leaving the town that had been home for more than twenty-five years. "Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man. Here the most sacred ties of earth were assumed; here all my children were born; and here one of them lies buried. To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am."
Lincoln boarded the inaugural train and embarked upon a nearly two week journey that amounted to a whistle stop tour, as he ended his silence with speeches in towns large and small, before state legislatures and from hotel balconies. He stressed his fealty to the Union, and he urged Americans to remain calm. He characterized the secession crisis as an artificial dilemma created by "designing politicians." He also made clear his firmness of pupose, solemnly vowing "There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union."
Lincoln's first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, was criticized at the time in the North for being too conciliatory and in the South for being a call to war. He assured the Southern states they had nothing to fear from a Republican president. He disavowed any intention to meddle with slavery in the South, tepidly endorsed a constitutional amendment to that effect, and pledged to enforce the fugitive slave act.
Lincoln recognized no right to secession. The Union was "perpetual;" it predated the Constitution and could not be sundered. While he affirmed his intention to execute federal laws and hold federal property as his oath of office required, Lincoln pledged not to be the first to break the peace. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors."
Perhaps the country was too polarized to hear it, but Lincoln closed his inaugural with an eloquent plea for a renewal of sectional harmony. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
A little more than a month later, cannon fire in Charleston harbor heralded the opening of the Civil War, a conflict that would end with Lincoln's martyrdom and apotheosis.