Anatomy
Groups
Index

This Week in History

February 7 — 13, 1809

On Lincoln's Birthday: Recalling His Efforts To Unite the Republican Party Around a Moral Principle

There is no better way to mark Abraham Lincoln's birthday on Feb. 12 than to look at a lesser-known phase of his life, after his 1858 defeat in the campaign to win the U.S. Senate seat held by Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln had won the popular vote, but the Illinois Legislature cast its majority vote for Douglas. Rather than withdraw from politics at a time when a great crisis faced the nation, Lincoln dedicated himself to inspiring the Republican Party to face that crisis.

"The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even 100 defeats." "Never forget that we have before us this whole matter of right or wrong." Driving, often alone, in an open buggy across the prairies and plains, Abraham Lincoln made these statements, and others like them, to audiences in Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio. It was the late winter and spring of 1859, and Lincoln was rallying Republicans in particular, and Americans in general, to keep fighting against the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," a term coined to mask the extension of slavery into every corner of the nation.

What worried Lincoln and others around him was that some members of the new Republican Party had become discouraged and were tempted to grasp at the coattails of Douglas, who was the leading national advocate of "popular sovereignty." Some Republicans were even speaking of supporting Douglas in the upcoming 1860 Presidential election, and had previously even considered backing him for the Senate against their own candidate, Abraham Lincoln.

The slippery Douglas, who was losing the support of Southern Democrats, was attempting to attract Republicans by telling them that he had opposed enacting a slave code that would protect slavery in the national territories. He also reminded them that he had fought against the reopening of the African slave trade. Lincoln feared that Douglas was positioning himself so that if he lost the Democratic nomination, he would "bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power."

Disputes over secondary issues were also erupting in the Republican Party, setting one potential candidate or state grouping against another. Lincoln set out to stop this bickering in its tracks, and to remind everyone of the overriding principles for which they were fighting. And although he was trying to establish party harmony, Lincoln did not hesitate to oppose sections of the party when their moral compass became clouded.

There was a strong nativist movement in Massachusetts, and when that state's Republicans endorsed a constitutional provision requiring a two-year waiting period before naturalized citizens could vote, Lincoln opposed it forcefully. "I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the Negro," said Lincoln, "and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself."

Lincoln began his task of reminding the Republicans that they must unite to save the nation, by delivering a major speech in Chicago on March l, 1859, his first political speech since the end of his Senatorial campaign. After thanking his fellow Republicans for supporting his campaign, he referred to events during that contest which he wanted them to consider carefully:

"I understand that in some speeches I made I said something, or was supposed to have said something, that some very good people, as I really believe them to be, commented upon unfavorably, and said that rather than support one holding such sentiments as I had expressed, the real friends of liberty could afford to wait awhile.

Full article on separate page...