A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  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 Repub
licans 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.