Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Disappointing though his defeat was to both him and his spouse, Lincoln could derive satisfaction for having laid the foundation for the Illinois Republican Party, which would mature into a full-blown organization by 1856. By magnanimously throwing his support to Trumbull, Lincoln had helped cement the coalition of former Whigs and former Democrats. He might also have taken heart from John M. Palmer’s pledge that he and his Democratic friends would “stand by him in the next fight … against Douglas.”243 Lincoln’s statesmanlike reaction to his loss illustrated the truth of Richard J. Oglesby’s observation that he “submit[t]ed to adversity and injustice with as much real patience as any Man I Ever knew—because he had an abiding belief that all would yet come out right or that the right would appear and Justice finally be awarded to him.”244 And so it would.

  11

  “Unite with Us, and Help Us to Triumph”

  Building the Illinois Republican Party

  (1855–1857)

  “You enquire where I now stand,” Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in the summer of 1855. “This is a disputed point. I think I am a Whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” That was not the case, he insisted, for “I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.”1 To unite all who shared this goal became Lincoln’s quest. As he helped build a new antislavery party to replace the defunct Whig organization, he little imagined that he would soon become its standard-bearer. In this party endeavor, he displayed the statesmanlike qualities that would characterize his presidency: eloquence, shrewdness, industry, patience, selflessness, diplomacy, commitment to principle, willingness to shoulder responsibility, and a preternatural sense of timing. While many joined the Republican ranks out of hostility to the South, the tolerant Lincoln played down sectional antagonism and focused on the evils of the peculiar institution itself.

  Difficulty in Forming a New Party

  Of all the obstacles Lincoln faced in rallying Illinoisans against the extension of slavery, none was more formidable than the upsurge of nativism and prohibitionism. In June 1855, the prohibitionist distraction faded after voters in the Prairie State soundly defeated a measure outlawing the sale of liquor. The nativist movement, however, proved more durable.

  In 1855, the Know-Nothings of Illinois united to form a branch of the American Party, which denounced Catholicism, immigrants, and the expansion of slavery. Their bigotry alienated many other antislavery advocates, making it difficult to keep the successful anti-Nebraska coalition intact. Antagonizing the foreign-born, who constituted 20 percent of Illinois’s population, would be politically ruinous, but so, too, would be any move that offended the nativists. David Davis, who shared Lincoln’s views, complained that the “intelligent and right-minded and useful portion of the Whig party in this state will not join the K[now] N[othing]s. They cannot affiliate with them at all, believing their policy to be mean, narrow, and selfish, and hence the State will go for Douglass. The liquor vote goes for the Democrats, and the foreign vote, by the present course of things, is forced to go for them. But for the combined force of these two elements, the Democracy would have been by this time—owing to their devotion to slavery—past any chance of doing harm.”2

  In the summer and fall of 1855, abolitionists Owen Lovejoy, Joshua R. Giddings, Ichabod Codding, and Zebina Eastman campaigned throughout Illinois trying to enlist support for their cause and lay the groundwork for a Republican victory in the 1856 presidential election. The Joliet Signal sneered at this effort to promote what it called “a nigger-stealing, stinking, putrid abolition party,” and Whig papers expressed skepticism about the endeavor.3 In Quincy at the end of July, the proselytizers managed to convince some western Illinois Whigs, Free Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats to band together on a platform opposing the extension of slavery.

  When Lovejoy proposed that a state antislavery convention meet in Springfield that autumn, Lincoln replied that although he was ready to endorse the principles of the Quincy meeting, the time was not yet ripe for a new party. “Not even you are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I,” he told Lovejoy; “and yet the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong.” The main problem was that the Know-Nothing organization had “not yet entirely crumbled to pieces,” and until the antislavery forces could win over elements of it, “there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with.” As long as nativists “cling to a hope of success under their own organization,” they were unlikely to abandon it. “I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them.” In central Illinois the Know-Nothings were, Lincoln said, some of his “old political and personal friends,” among them Joseph Gillespie of Edwardsville. Lincoln “hoped their organization would die out without the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them.” Of course he deplored their principles: “Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.” He was not squeamish about combining with “any body who stands right,” but the Know-Nothings stood wrong.4

  In 1855, Lincoln, like many others, still nursed a hope that the Whig Party might continue as a viable organization. In the presidential election of 1848, it had won 43 percent of the popular vote, and four years later its share of the vote had declined only slightly to 42 percent. Moreover, Whigs held four of Illinois’s nine seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  Lyman Trumbull concurred with Lincoln about the wisdom of forming a new party, telling Lovejoy that it was “very questionable” whether “it would be advisable at this time to call a State Convention of all those opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, irrespective of party.” In the Alton area “there is so much party feeling, so great aversion to what is called fusion, that very few democrats would be likely to unite in a Convention composed of all parties. If a convention of the Democracy, opposed equally to the spread of slavery, to abolition & Know Nothingism, could be called, we could, I think, get a respectable representation from this part of the State, and such a movement would probably damage the Nebraska democracy more than anything else which could be done; but I do not presume any considerable portion of the North would unite in a Convention of this kind.” To carry Illinois, “we must keep out of the pro-slavery party a large number of those who are democrats.” To accomplish that objective required overcoming “old party associations, & side issues, such as Know Nothingism & the Temperance question.”5 Discouraged by Lincoln and Trumbull, Lovejoy and his allies postponed plans for a statewide convention.

  Joshua Giddings also tried to enlist Lincoln’s support for a new antislavery party. In September, the Ohio congressman invited Lincoln to meet with him, Archibald Williams, and Richard Yates, saying: “You my dear sir may now by your own personal efforts give direction to those movements which are to determine the next Presidential election.”6 Because he had to be in Cincinnati on business at that time, Lincoln could not accept his friend’s invitation.

  Lincoln’s doubts about launching a new party in 1855 were as great as his skepticism about nonviolent abolition. Writing to Kentucky attorney George Robertson, who during the congressional debates over the Missouri Compromise in 1820 had predicted the peaceable elimination of slavery, Lincoln said: “Since then we have had thirty six years of experience” which “demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” Lincoln pointed to the unsuccessful 1849 effort made by Kentuckians, led by Henry Clay, to abolish slavery gradually. Their defeat, “together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly,” Lincoln declared. He bemoaned the decline of American virtue since 1776, when the nation “called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self evident truth.” Now, he said, “we have grown so fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ ”
Sarcastically, he observed: “The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—for burning fire crackers!!!” The idealism of the Revolutionary era, which had prompted several states to abolish slavery, “has itself become extinct,” he lamented.

  Lincoln’s compassion for the slaves shone through his assessment of their current plight: “So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned,” Lincoln wrote to Robertson, “the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent.” He predicted that the “Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” Foreshadowing a speech that would make him famous three years later, Lincoln told Robertson: “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?’ The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”7

  To another Kentuckian, Joshua Speed, Lincoln also unbosomed himself on the vexed question of slavery. Speed had criticized Northerners for agitating the slavery issue, which, he maintained, concerned Southerners alone; the people of the North should mind their own business. In response, Lincoln argued that Speed ought to applaud the restraint shown by him and other Free State residents who were willing to honor constitutional provisions regarding fugitive slaves and states rights. With heartfelt emotion, Lincoln reminded Speed of a journey they had taken years earlier: “In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”

  Passing from old memories to current affairs, Lincoln expressed outrage at events in Kansas, where proslavery forces, led by Missourians, ran roughshod over Free Soilers, stealing elections by fraud and violence, expelling antislavery legislators, and passing statutes that forbade criticism of slavery and imposed the death penalty on anyone assisting runaway slaves. When Speed declared that if he were president he would support the death penalty for the so-called Missouri border ruffians, Lincoln replied that there was little hope for a “fair decision of the slavery question in Kansas” because the Kansas-Nebraska Act was not really a statute: “I look upon that enactment not as a law, but as violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.” Sarcastically he predicted that Kansas would enter the Union as a Slave State, even though most settlers there opposed slavery: “By every principle of law, ever held by any court, North or South, every negro taken to Kansas is free; yet in utter disregard of this—in the spirit of violence merely—that beautiful Legislature [in Kansas] gravely passes a law to hang men who shall venture to inform a negro of his legal rights.”

  The friends of slavery would prevail in Congress, Lincoln predicted, because Northern politicians were corruptible. With asperity perhaps rooted in his defeat for the senate a few months earlier, he told Speed: “Standing as a unit among yourselves, you [slaveholders] can, directly, and indirectly, bribe enough of our men to carry the day—as you could on an open proposition to establish monarchy.” Scornfully he referred to the Democratic party’s iron discipline: “Get hold of some man in the North, whose position and ability is such, that he can make the support of your measure—whatever it may be—a democratic party necessity, and the thing is done.” Reluctant as he was to deny anyone “the enjoyment of property acquired, or located, in good faith,” Lincoln could not “admit that good faith, in taking a negro to Kansas, to be held in slavery, is a possibility with any man.” No sensible person could “misunderstand the outrageous character of this whole Kansas business.”

  In response to Speed’s professed willingness to dissolve the Union if the rights of slaveholders were violated, Lincoln said that he would not back secession if the tables were turned and Kansas were admitted as a Slave State. To be sure, Speed had expressed the hope that Kansas would be admitted as a Free State; but, Lincoln rejoined, slaveholders’ deeds belied their words. “All decent slaveholders talk that way; and I do not doubt their candor. But they never vote that way.” In private correspondence or conversation, “you will express your preference that Kansas shall be free,” but “you would vote for no man for Congress who would say the same thing publicly.” Echoing his 1854 Peoria address, Lincoln told his old friend that “slave-breeders and slave traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the masters of your own negroes.” Though dubious about the prospects for a free Kansas, Lincoln said he would work for that cause: “In my humble sphere, I shall advocate the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, so long as Kansas remains a territory; and when, by all these foul means, it seeks to come into the Union as a Slave-state, I shall oppose it.”8

  In the fall of 1855, Lincoln stumped Illinois to carry out that pledge. As he had done the previous year, he followed Douglas around the state, responding to the Little Giant’s attempts to reunite the Democratic Party and vindicate his record. No account of Lincoln’s speeches has survived. He probably made arguments similar to the ones contained in his 1854 addresses and in his subsequent letters to Robertson and Speed. Lincoln’s efforts won the approval of Samuel Hitt, who told David Davis: “I am glad Lincoln is at Douglass’ heels. D’s friends here are using every possible means to build him up, and, lamentable to tell, they make some head way.”9 In December, Davis reported that “Lincoln made a few very able speeches this fall and was to answer Douglas at Danville, when he [Douglas] was taken sick.” The senator had come down with bronchitis and underwent throat surgery in December. He had worn himself out campaigning not only in Illinois but in several other states as he positioned himself for yet another presidential run.

  During the campaign, Lincoln was also thinking about the 1856 election and how to promote the antislavery cause. He probably shared the pessimistic view of David Davis, who noted that election results in New York and Massachusetts gave “such an impetus to this Know Nothing movement throughout the free states, & so frittered away & weakened the opposition to the democracy, that the next Presidential race will certainly be spoiled.”10 (In New York and Massachusetts, Know-Nothing candidates for secretary of state and governor, respectively, won. Rufus Choate expressed the disgust that many Northerners, including Lincoln, felt at the nativists’ triumph: “Any thing more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold leavings of history have not cast up. We shall come to the worship of onions, cats and things vermiculate.”)11

  To lay plans for combating the Know-Nothing threat, Lincoln met in January 1856 with Ebenezer Peck, Lyman Trumbull, Jackson Grimshaw, Joseph Gillespie, C. D. Hay, and Gustave Koerner, among others. It was agreed that the antislavery Whigs and Democrats would have to work together, but they were not sure how to respond to the possibility that the Know-Nothings might field their own candidates for office. The antislavery men, who realized that a former Democrat stood a much better chance of winning than an ex-Whig, favored William H. Bissell for governor.

  Launching the New Party: The Decatur Editors’ Convention

  Shortly after the 1855 elections, a group of antislavery newspapermen launched another attempt to unify the friends of freedom. In November, Paul Selby of the Jacksonville Morgan Journal proposed that editors of anti-Nebraska journa
ls convene to lay the foundation for a new party. When the Winchester Chronicle seconded the idea, young John G. Nicolay, editor of the Pike County Free Press, provisionally endorsed the suggestion not only because such a convention would “be the most direct means of bringing about a triumphant victory in our next State election” but also because “it will tend to bring about a proper appreciation and recognition of the power and influence of the Political Press.” To be effective, “all ultraism would have to be avoided, and conservative principles adopted as a basis of union.”12 Other editors also feared “too much ultraism.”13

  Soon after the Pike County Free Press’s endorsed the formation of a new party, more than twenty papers followed suit. When George T. Brown of the Alton Courier and John T. Morton of the Quincy Whig suggested that the meeting be held on February 22 at Decatur, centrally located and well-served by trains, Nicolay protested that it “will scarcely leave time to make the necessary arrangements. We have plenty of time before us, and it is not worth while to act in too much haste.”14 Despite Nicolay’s objections, however, the recommendation for time and place was accepted. On January 10 a call signed by five papers appeared in the Decatur Illinois Chronicle, whose editor, William J. Usrey, predicted an attendance of fifty to seventy-five. But when a severe snowstorm hit central Illinois, only twelve hardy journalists managed to reach Decatur for the event.

  Lincoln participated in the meeting as an informal guest. He had grown more optimistic about the chances for successful fusion because hostility to slavery and to the South was mounting throughout the North, largely in response to the outrages in Kansas. One conservative Northern paper declared that after “fighting the battle of the South for twelve long years, defending its political rights, domestic institutions, social character, manners and habits on all occasions, recent occurrences have convinced us that the time has come for the North, with its superior numbers, intelligence, wealth and power, to take a stand, firm and fixed as its granite hills, against the threatening, bullying, brow-beating, skull-breaking spirit of the South—a spirit that tramples on Compromise; violates the sacred freedom of parliamentary debate; and murders the settlers upon our common soil for simply opposing, by voice and vote, the fastening of slavery upon a free and virgin Territory.… However mischievous and detestable the sentiments promulgated by [the Republicans] may be, they have never resorted to bullets and bludgeons to carry their points, or to silence their opponents.”15