Abraham Lincoln

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Election of 1856

In 1856 Lincoln publicly identified himself as a Republican, and in May he attended the Republican state convention at Bloomington. The moderate antislavery resolutions of this convention were acceptable to Lincoln. He signified his approval of the new party by giving the main address at the convention. This speech, considered by many to be his most compelling, has been lost. At the Republican national convention, John C. Frémont was nominated for president. The Illinois delegation proposed Lincoln for vice president, but, although he received 110 convention votes, the nomination went to William C. Dayton of New Jersey. Lincoln campaigned for the Republican ticket in Illinois and in Michigan, but Frémont lost Illinois, as well as the election, to his Democratic opponent, James Buchanan.

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Candidate for United States Senate

Agitation over the slavery issue increased in 1856 and 1857. In the Dred Scott Case the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. In Kansas proslavery and antislavery partisans were engaged in a bloody civil war for control of the territorial government. Northern abolitionists demanded the immediate destruction of slavery, while Southern apologists insisted that their “peculiar institution” was beneficial to both slaveowner and slave.

In 1858 Senator Douglas came up for reelection. The Republican Party nominated Lincoln to oppose him. In his acceptance speech before the Republican state convention in Springfield, Lincoln said, “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.” This was Lincoln's most extreme statement against slavery. Although he returned to his more moderate position as expressed in the Peoria speech, his opponents used the militant words of the House Divided speech against him.

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1

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Both Lincoln and Douglas were excellent speakers. When Douglas was told that Lincoln was his opponent, he said, “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of the party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West.”

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The campaign opened in Chicago. Douglas defended popular sovereignty and attacked Lincoln for his “house divided” speech. He accused Lincoln of trying to divide the nation. Lincoln replied by calling for national unity. Recalling the Declaration of Independence, the document on which the United States was founded, he said, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race, being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

In July, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of face-to-face debates. Douglas accepted. It was arranged that seven three-hour debates would be held in seven different cities between August and October. In the debates, both candidates respected each other and kept to the issues. The crux of the discussion was the morality of slavery.

The debates captivated Illinois. About 10,000 people listened to the first debate under a blazing hot sun at Ottawa. Over 15,000 listened in drizzling rain at Freeport. Even in the small towns where the candidates spoke alone, crowds of as many as 6000 were common. The newspapers carried the arguments of each candidate throughout the nation.

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2

Freeport Doctrine

In the second debate, at Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas whether the people of a territory could lawfully exclude slavery prior to the formation of a state constitution. Douglas replied that slavery could be excluded from a territory, despite the Dred Scott decision, if the people refused to enact the necessary local laws for its protection. This opinion, known as the Freeport Doctrine, cost Douglas much of his support among Southern Democrats who were thinking of him as a presidential candidate in 1860.

In the last debate, at Alton, Lincoln said, “The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican Party. On the other hand, I have said there is a sentiment which treats it as not being wrong....That class will include all men who positively assert that it is right, and all who like Judge Douglas treat it as indifferent and do not say it is either right or wrong.”

Lincoln believed he had a good chance of defeating Douglas. Indeed, the Republicans won a majority of the popular votes, but the lame-duck legislature, which was Democratic, reelected Douglas by a vote of 54 to 46. Lincoln was not too disappointed about the results. He wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some remarks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”

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Election of 1860

The Lincoln-Douglas debates brought Lincoln national recognition. He accepted invitations to speak in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and at the Cooper Union college in New York City.