The Multi-Media Edition

Tag: Needs Close Reading Page 2 of 3

Letter to Hannibal Hamlin (September 28, 1862)

Ranking

#85 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, September 28, 1862

The Lincoln Log, September 28, 1862

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.45.12 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Not too many days after the preliminary proclamation was issued, Vice President Hannibal Hamlin wrote a letter to the president to express his ‘undissembled and sincere thanks for your Emancipation proclamation,’ which he predicted would ‘stand as the great act of the age… wise in Statesmanship as it is Patriotic.’ But Lincoln was not so sure. In a reply he labeled ‘strictly private,’ the president poured out his fears and frustrations over the early public response to his document. The fascinating letter reveals a chief executive who knows he will be judged not just by history but by his public constituency – and is clearly not at all sure he will emerge a winner. Modern Americans who doubt the revolutionary impetus and grand daring behind Lincoln’s most famous act will understand from the Hamlin letter how unpredictable its author believed its impact would be.”

— Frank J. Williams, “’Doing less’ and ‘Doing more’: The president and the Proclamation – Legally, Militarily, and Politically,” in The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views ed. Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 66.

 

“Public response to emancipation did not encourage Lincoln. On September 28, he told his vice-president that ‘while I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends. The time for its effect southward has not come; but northward the effect should be instantaneous. It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning – the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.’”

— Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 28 (PDF), 3530.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

(Strictly private.)
Executive Mansion,
Washington,
September 28, 1862.
 
My Dear Sir:
Your kind letter of the 25th is just received. It is known to some that while I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends. The time for its effect southward has not come; but northward the effect should be instantaneous.
 
It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning—the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.
 
I wish I could write more cheerfully; nor do I thank you the less for the kindness of your letter.
 
Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN.

Letter to Mary Owens (August 16, 1837)

Ranking

#91 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, August 16, 1837

The Lincoln Log, August 16, 1837

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.31.34 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Not surprisingly, Mary Owens rejected this diffident proposal. As she later explained, “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness…Not that I believed it proceeded from a lack of goodness of heart; but his training had been different from mine; hence there was not that congeniality which would otherwise have existed.”  Lincoln had behaved in ways that she understandably considered thoughtless and insensitive to her feelings. One day, for example, while riding with other New Salem young women and their swains, they have to a creek. All the men save Lincoln gallantly helped their companions cross. Owens chided her escort, You are a nice fellow!   I suppose you did not care whether my neck was broken or not.” Lincoln replied laughingly that he reckoned she was plenty smart enough to care for herself.”

—Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 134.

“Evidently Lincoln wished to escape gracefully from a romance now gone stale. If so, the lady obliged him. She ignored his letter, and they never met again.”

—Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (SIU Press, 2008), 70.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Springfield
Aug. 16th 1837
 
Friend Mary. 
You will, no doubt, think it rather strange, that I should write you a letter on the same day on which we parted; and I can only account for it by supposing, that seeing you lately makes me think of you more than usual, while at our late meeting we had but few expressions of thoughts. You must know that I can not see you, or think of you, with entire indifference; and yet it may be, that you, are mistaken in regard to what my real feelings towards you are. If I knew you were not, I should not trouble you with this letter. Perhaps any other man would know enough without further information; but I consider it my peculiar right to plead ignorance, and your bounden duty to allow the plea. I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it. And for the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible, I now say, that you can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer from me. And I will even go further, and say, that if it will add any thing to your comfort, or peace of mind, to do so, it is my sincere wish that you should. Do not understand by this, that I wish to cut your acquaintance. I mean no such thing. What I do wish is, that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself. If such further acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine. If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness. This, indeed, is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable—nothing more happy, than to know you were so.
 
In what I have now said, I think I can not be misunderstood; and to make myself understood, is the only object of this letter.
 
If it suits you best to not answer this—farewell—a long life and a merry one attend you. But if you conclude to write back, speak as plainly as I do. There can be neither harm nor danger, in saying, to me, any thing you think, just in the manner you think it.
 
My respects to your sister.
Your friend
LINCOLN.

To John Johnston (December 24, 1848)

Ranking

#93 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me  “We can get along very well now” but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct.What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 24, 1848

The Lincoln Log, December 24, 1848

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.19.20 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Abraham Lincoln’s view of his father’s indolence is unrecorded, but he did scold his stepbrother John D. Johnston for that flaw in letters which may reflect his attitude not only toward Johnston but also toward Thomas Lincoln”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

“A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern and Western rural laborers. He had the same disadvantages that they had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance; he was poisoned with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them possessed any glimmering notion of, a fixed and inflexible will to succeed. He did not love work, probably, any better than John Johnston; but he had an innate self-respect, and a consciousness that his self was worthy of respect, that kept him from idleness as it kept him from all other vices, and made him a better man every year that he lived.”

—John M. Hay and John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln (Orig. Ed. 1890; New York: Cosimo Inc., 2009), 77.  

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Washington, December 24, 1848
 
Dear Johnston:
Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me “We can get along very well now” but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in.
 
You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, “tooth and nails” for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home—prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get. And to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money, or in your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dolla[rs] a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this, I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines, in Calif[ornia,] but I [mean for you to go at it for the best wages you] can get close to home [in] Coles county. Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work. You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and, if you dont pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you cant now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been [kind] to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you.
 
Affectionately Your brother
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Elihu Washburne (February 9, 1855)

Ranking

#94 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“The agony is over at last; and the result you doubtless know. I write this only to give you some particulars to explain what might appear difficult of understanding. I began with 44 votes, Shields 41, and Trumbull 5—yet Trumbull was elected. In fact 47 different members voted for me—getting three new ones on the second ballot, and losing four old ones. How came my 47 to yield to T’s 5? It was Govr. Matteson’s work.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, February 9, 1855

The Lincoln Log, February 9, 1855

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.12.24 PM
 View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Despite the dignity of Lincoln’s public demeanor, he privately suffered a brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an “agony.” Though he had engineered Trumbull’s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause it was difficult to accept the manner of his loss. ‘He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace,’ he told his friend Gillespie, ‘but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.’ After all the hard work, the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, conversations with fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in finding new ways to shatter his dreams.”

—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 173.

If Matteson and his friends did resort to bribery, which seems highly likely, then it is easy to understand why Lincoln rejoiced at thwarting the governor’s scheme. “I regret my defeat moderately,” he told Washburne, “but I am not nervous about it. I could have headed off every combination and been elected, had it not been for Matteson’s double game – and the governor’s defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain.” Lincoln was not gloating or being vindictive; he was genuinely offended by Matteson’s tactics and regarded the governor’s defeat as an ideological triumph, a rebuke to Democrats who had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “On the whole,” he mused to Washburne, “it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected. The Neb[raska] men confess that they hate it worse than any thing that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am. I tell them it is their own fault – that they had abundant opertunity to choose between him & me, which they declined, and instead forced it on me to decide between him & Matteson.” Trumbull confirmed Lincoln’s observation, reporting that the pro-Nebraska Democrats “are exhibiting towards me a great deal of ill natured & malignant feeling.” The editor of the Chicago Times told Douglas that Trumbull’s election constituted “the severest blow we could have received.”

— Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (PDF), pp. 1148-1149.

“‘There is a long and painful history of that senatorial contest yet to be written,’ insisted Elihu B. Washburne, one of the key figures in the campaign, ‘and when the whole truth is disclosed it will throw a flood of new light on the character of Mr. Lincoln.’ While an examination of the 1855 contest may not ‘throw a flood of new light’ on Lincoln, it does present one of the fullest and most striking portraits yet available of Lincoln as a political leader. Start with his decision to elect Trumbull, which was not simply a selfless gesture. Lincoln helped elect a man whose own supporters had betrayed him. Some overlooked recollections of the contest, plus a letter Lincoln wrote after the election but not discovered until 1989, suggest that Governor Joel A. Matteson (another candidate in the race) was arranging to buy votes in the Trumbull camp when Lincoln intervened. Lincoln had entered the ballot expecting to lose and hoping only to prevent anyone else, including Trumbull, from winning; he switched gears only when he discovered that Matteson was cheating. Yet Lincoln achieved more than just revenge. By supporting a former Democrat, he finished laying the foundation for what would become the Republican party of Illinois—a job he had pursued since the beginning of his campaign the previous November.”

—Matthew Pinsker, “Senator Abraham Lincoln”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, 1993.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Springfield, Feby. 9-1855
 
Hon: E. B. Washburne
 
My dear Sir: 
The agony is over at last; and the result you doubtless know. I write this only to give you some particulars to explain what might appear difficult of understanding. I began with 44 votes, Shields 41, and Trumbull 5—yet Trumbull was elected. In fact 47 different members voted for me—getting three new ones on the second ballot, and losing four old ones. How came my 47 to yield to T’s 5? It was Govr. Matteson’s work. He has been secretly a candidate every since (before even) the fall election. All the members round about the canal were Anti-Nebraska; but were, nevertheless nearly all democrats, and old personal friends of his. His plan was to privately impress them with the belief that he was as good Anti-Nebraska as any one else—at least could be secured to be so by instructions, which could be easily passed. In this way he got from four to six of that sort of men to really prefer his election to that of any other man—all “sub rosa” of course. One notable instance of this sort was with Mr. Strunk of Kankakee. At the beginning of the session he came a volunteer to tell me he was for me & would walk a hundred miles to elect me; but lo, it was not long before he leaked it out that he was going for me the first few ballots & then for Govr. Matteson.
 
The Nebraska men, of course, were not for Matteson; but when they found they could elect no avowed Nebraska man they tardily determined, to let him get whomever of our men he could by whatever means he could and ask him no questions. In the mean time Osgood, Don. Morrison & Trapp of St. Clair had openly gone over from us. With the united Nebraska force, and their recruits, open & covert, it gave Matteson more than enough to elect him. We saw into it plainly ten days ago; but with every possible effort, could not head it off. All that remained of the Anti Nebraska force, excepting Judd, Cook, Palmer[,] Baker & Allen of Madison, & two or three of the secret Matteson men, would go into caucus, & I could get the nomination of that caucus. But the three Senators & one of the two representatives above named “could never vote for a whig” and this incensed some twenty whigs to “think” they would never vote for the man of the five. So we stood, and so we went into the fight yesterday; the Nebraska men very confident of the election of Matteson, though denying that he was a candidate; and we very much believing also, that they would elect him. But they wanted first to make a show of good faith to Shields by voting for him a few times, and our secret Matteson men also wanted to make a show of good faith by voting with us a few times. So we led off. On the seventh ballot, I think, the signal was given to the Neb. men, to turn on to Matteson, which they acted on to a man, with one exception; my old friend Strunk going with them giving him 44 votes. Next ballot the remaining Neb. man, & one pretended Anti- went on to him, giving him 46. The next still another giving him 47, wanting only three of an election. In the mean time, our friends with a view of detaining our expected bolters had been turning from me to Trumbull till he he [sic] had risen to 35 & I had been reduced to 15. These would never desert me except by my direction; but I became satisfied that if we could prevent Matteson’s election one or two ballots more, we could not possibly do so a single ballot after my friends should begin to return to me from Trumbull. So I determined to strike at once; and accordingly advised my remaining friends to go for him, which they did & elected him on that the 10th. ballot.
 
Such is the way the thing was done. I think you would have done the same under the circumstances; though Judge Davis, who came down this morning, declares he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5. I regret my defeat moderately, but I am not nervous about it. I could have headed off every combination and been elected, had it not been for Matteson’s double game—and his defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain. On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected. The Neb. men confess that they hate it worse than any thing that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am. I tell them it is their own fault—that they had abundant opertunity [sic] to choose between him & me, which they declined, and instead forced it on me to decide between him & Matteson.
 
With my grateful acknowledgments for the kind, active, and continued interest you have taken for me in this matter, allow me to subscribe myself
Yours forever
A. LINCOLN—

Letter to Jesse Norton (February 16, 1855)

Ranking

#95 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I have now been beaten one day over a week; and I am very happy to find myself quite convalescent.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, February 16, 1855

The Lincoln Log, February 16, 1855

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.09.19 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“By the time the legislature convened in early January, Lincoln’s hard work lining up the antislavery members paid dividends; Washburne, Norton, Giddings, Ray, and others had overcome the objections of most abolitionists. Lincoln later told Norton: ‘Through the untiring efforts of friends, among whom yourself and Washburne were chief, I finally surmounted the difficulty with the extreme Anti-Slavery men, and got all their votes, Lovejoy’s included.'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (PDF), pp. 1135-1136.

“In 1855, however, Lincoln had been somewhat less cool, complaining to Norton about ‘maneuvering’ of Governor Matteson, which he insisted had ‘forced upon me and my friends the necessity of surrendering to Trumbull.’ The bile here does not make complete sense unless placed in the context of some unique details that Lincoln provided within the newly discovered letter about Matteson’s ‘tampering.’ There have long been other extant accounts from Lincoln describing the results of the 1855 senatorial balloting, but none except for this recently published letter to Norton identify by name those who cast all their ballots with Lincoln or Trumbull, but were still apparently pledged in secret to Matteson. The fact underscores the startling conclusion that Lincoln was almost surely pushed into a last-minute alliance with anti-Nebraska Democrats because the regular Democratic governor of the state was just about to succeed in buying the election. Other previously available evidence from the period has loosely suggested corruption by the Democrats, such as one of the newer letters from Lincoln which reported from the days before the balloting that his men had hoped the Democrats had ‘reached the bottom of the rotten material’ but conceded, ‘What mines and pitfalls they have under us we do not know.’ Only this summary provided to Norton makes explicit what has in the past been mere conjecture and highlights another reality of political culture in the 1850s—it was rife with fraud.”

—Matthew Pinsker ,”Boss Lincoln” in The Living LincolnEd. Thomas Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank J. Williams (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 30-31.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Springfield, Feb. 16, 1855
Hon: J.O. Norton
 
My dear Sir:
I have now been beaten one day over a week; and I am very happy to find myself quite convalescent.  Your kind letter of the 20th of Jan’y I did not receive till the day before yesterday –owing, I suppose to our great snow-storm.  The day after the election I wrote Washburne the particulars, tolerably fully.  Through the untiring efforts of friends, among whom yourself and Washburne were chief, I finally surmounted the difficulty with the extreme Anti-Slavery men, and got all their votes, Lovejoy’s included.  Cook, Judd, Palmer, and Baker of Alton were the men who never could vote for a whig; and without the votes of two of whom I never could reach the requisite number to make an election. I do not mean that I actually got within two votes of the required number; but I easily enough could have done so, provided I could have assured my friends that two of the above named four would go for me.  In this connection it is necessary to bear in mind that your Senator Osgood, together with Don. Morrison, Kinney & Trapp of St Clair had openly gone over to the enemy.  
It was Govr Matteson’s manoevering that forced upon me and my friends the necessity of surrendering to Trumbull.  He made his first successful hit by tampering with Old man Strunk.  Strunk was pledged to me, which Matteson knew, but he succeeded in persuading him that I stood no chance of an election, and in getting a pledge from him to go for him as second choice.  He next made similar impressions on Hills of DuPage, Parks of your town, and Strawn and Day of LaSalle –at least we saw strong signs that he had, and they being old democrats, and I an old whig, I could get no sufficient access to them to sound them to the bottom.  
That Matteson assured the Nebraska democrats, he could get their men after they should have made a respectable show by voting a few ballots for other men, I think there is no doubt; and by holding up to their greedy eyes this amount of capital in our ranks, it was, that he induced the Nebraska men to drop Shields and take him en masse.  The Nebraska men, since Osgood’s and Don’s defection, had control of the Senate; and they refused to pass the resolution for going into the election till three hours before the joint session was to, and did in fact, commence.  One of the Nebraska senators has since told me that they only passed the resolution when they did, upon being privately assured by the Governor that he had it all safe.  
I have omitted to say that it was well understood Baker would vote for Trumbull, but would go over to Matteson rather than me.  
Passing over the first eight ballots which you have doubtless seen, when, on the ninth, Matteson had 47 –having every Nebraska man, and the Old man Strunk besides, and wanting but three of an election; and when the looser sort of my friends had gone over to Trumbull, and raised him to 35 and reduced me to 15 it struck me that Hills, Parks, Strawn, Day, and Baker, or at least some three of them would go over from Trumbull to Matteson & elect him on the tenth ballot, unless they should be kept on T. by seeing my remaining men coming on to him.  I accordingly gave the intimation which my friends acted upon, electing T. that ballot.  All were taken by surprise, Trumbull quite as much as any one else.
There was no pre-concert about it –in fact I think a pre-concert to that effect could not have been made.  The heat of the battle, andimminent danger of Matteson’s election were indispensably necessary to the result.  I know that few, if any, of my remaining 15 men would have gone from me without my direction; and I gave the direction, simultaneously with forming the resolution to do it.
It is not true, as might appear by the first ballot, that Trumbull had only five friends who preferred him to me.  I know the business of all the men tolerably well, and my opinion is, that if the 51 who elected him, were compelled to a naked expression of preference between him and me, he would at the outside, have 16 and I would have the remainder.  And this again would depend substantially upon the fact that his 16 came from the old democratic ranks & the remainder from the whigs.  Such as preferred him, yet voted for me on the first ballottings and so on the idea that a minority among friends, ought not to stand out against a majority.  
Lest you might receive a different impression, I wish to say I hold Judge Parks in very high estimation; believing him to be neither knave or fool, but decidedly the reverse of both.  Now, as I have called names so freely, you will of course consider this confidential.
Yours much obliged, &c.
A. Lincoln

Letter to Owen Lovejoy (August 11, 1855)

Contributing editors for this page include James Duncan

Ranking

#96 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Know-nothingism has not yet entirely tumbled to pieces—nay, it is even a little encouraged by the late elections in Tennessee, Kentucky & Alabama. Until we can get the elements of this organization, there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with. We can not get them so long as they cling to a hope of success under their own organization; and I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them. About us here, they are mostly my old political and personal friends; and I have hoped their organization would die out without the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, August 11, 1855

The Lincoln Log, August 11, 1855

Close Readings


Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” participant James Duncan, 2016

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 6.01.47 PM
View in Larger Map 

How Historians Interpret

“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 slavery expansion. 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 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.”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 11 (PDF), 1159.

 

“In the political confusion between 1854 and 1856, anti-Nebraska elements often sought coalitions with Know-Nothings in efforts that became known as “fusion.” Antislavery candidates for Congress in 1854 often received nativist support. In Illinois, candidates in the third, fourth, and seventh congressional districts were greatly aided by Know-Nothing endorsements. Indiana editor and budding Republican politician Schuyler Colfax published anti-Catholic stories in his newspaper. There was some ideological affinity between free soil and nativism. One free-soil paper suggested that the “two malign powers”—Slavery and Catholicism—”have a natural affinity for each other.” On the other hand, many anti-Nebraska leaders deplored the bigotry inherent in the Know-Nothings and were fearful of alienating the crucial support of Protestant Germans.”

–Mitchell Snay, “Abraham Lincoln, Owen Lovejoy, and the Emergence of the Republican Party in Illinois,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 22, no. 1 (2001): 82-99.

 

“The failed Senate election of 1855 forced Lincoln to reexamine his resistance to fusion and to ask whether, once gain, his passion for loyalty had kept him loyal to a losing proposition… when Lovejoy urged Lincoln in August, 1855, to join a ‘fusion’ movement in Illinois, Lincoln patiently explained that ‘not even you are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I,’ but still ‘the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong.’ Later that month, he told Joshua Speed that as far as he was concerned, ‘I think I am a Whig.’ But there were voices all around him which argued that ‘there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist, which was just the kind of radical association that any fusion movement was likely to taint him with. One thing which was ‘certain,’ he told Speed, was that he was ‘not a Know-Nothing’ Lincoln ‘opposed Know-Nothingism in all its phrases, everywhere, and at all times when it was sweeping over the land like wildfire,’ Herndon remarked. As Lincoln told Lovejoy, ‘I do not perceive how anyone one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.’ Without any identifiable religion of his own, Lincoln shared none of the anxieties of Whig Protestants about ‘political Romanism,’ and found the Know-Nothings, even more than the Calhounites, a standing repudiation of what ‘as a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’’ That had not prevented the Know-Nothings from trying to recruit him in 1854 as a state legislative candidate, and rumors that he had secretly taken the Know-Nothing oath cost him at least one critical vote in the 1855 senatorial election. If this was the future of fusion, Lincoln was better off staying a Whig, for what that might be worth.”

–Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 201-202.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

 

Searchable Text

Springfield,
August 11- 1855
 
Hon: Owen Lovejoy:
 
My dear Sir: 
Yours of the 7th. was received the day before yesterday. Not even you are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I; and yet the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong. Know-nothingism has not yet entirely tumbled to pieces—nay, it is even a little encouraged by the late elections in Tennessee, Kentucky & Alabama. Until we can get the elements of this organization, there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with. We can not get them so long as they cling to a hope of success under their own organization; and I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them. About us here, they are mostly my old political and personal friends; and I have hoped their organization would die out without the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. 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.
 
I have no objection to “fuse” with any body provided I can fuse on ground which I think is right; and I believe the opponents of slavery extension could now do this, if it were not for this K. N. ism. In many speeches last summer I advised those who did me the honor of a hearing to “stand with any body who stands right”— and I am still quite willing to follow my own advice. I lately saw, in the Quincy Whig, the report of a preamble and resolutions, made by Mr. Williams, as chairman of a committee, to a public meeting and adopted by the meeting. I saw them but once, and have them not now at command; but so far as I can remember them, they occupy about the ground I should be willing to “fuse” upon.
 
As to my personal movements this summer, and fall, I am quite busy trying to pick up my lost crumbs of last year. I shall be here till September; then to the circuit till the 20th. then to Cincinnati, awhile, after a Patent right case; and back to the circuit to the end of November. I can be seen here any time this month; and at Bloomington at any time from the 10th. to the 17th. of September. As to an extra session of the Legislature, I should know no better how to bring that about, than to lift myself over a fence by the straps of my boots.
Yours truly
A. LINCOLN—

 

Letter to Alexander McClure (August 30, 1860)

Ranking

#97 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are ‘canvassing’ – ‘counting noses?'”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, August 30, 1860

The Lincoln Log, August 30, 1860

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 5.58.45 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln also asked Alexander K. McClure, chairman of the Pennsylvania State Republican Committee, to keep him informed of the status of the campaign at the local level. On August 27, Lincoln responded to McClure report on the campaign by asking, ‘When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are ‘canvassing’—‘counting noses?’’ Lincoln’s inquiry reveals the keen interest that he took in local party organization during the 1860 campaign. A New York visitor reported after a meeting with Lincoln: ‘He sat down beside me on the sofa and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a knowledge of details which surprised me.’”

William C. Harris, “Lincoln’s Role in the 1860 Presidential Campaign” in Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President, Ed. Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank J. Williams, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Private
Springfield, Ills. Aug. 30, 1860
 
A.K. McClure, Esq.
My dear Sir,
 
Yours of the 27th was received last evening; as also was one only a few days before.  Neither of these bears quite so hopeful a tone as your former letters.  When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are “canvassing” – “counting noses?”
 
I am always glad to see your letters.   
Yours very truly, 
A.Lincoln

Letter to Don Buell (January 13, 1862)

Ranking

#98 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“With this preliminary, I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 13, 1862

The Lincoln Log, January 13, 1862

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 5.49.07 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Nonetheless, by early 1862, Lincoln’s correspondence reveals an increasing facility with the language and theoretical concepts of the professional soldier, and he applied his newfound knowledge to make clear to his generals both what he wanted to accomplish and how he expected it to be done. On 13 January 1862, he explained his thoughts quite clearly in a letter to Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell:

I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.

Lincoln had identified the key problem. His plan could not work without a general in chief capable of developing a unified plan for coordinated action and then executing it.”

–Carol Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 28.

 

“On January 13 Lincoln had written to Buell that the Union had the greater numbers but the Confederacy the greater facility of concentrating troops at points of decision, that therefore a proper strategy for the Union was to menace the Confederacy with superior forces at different points at the same time, that if the Confederate commander should weaken one point to strengthen another, then the Union ought to withhold attack from the strengthened point but attack the weakened one.”

–Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 288.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Executive Mansion, Washington,
Jan. 13, 1862.
 
Brig. Genl. Buell.
My dear Sir:  
Your despatch of yesterday is received, in which you say “I have received your letter and Gen. McClellan’s; and will, at once devote all my efforts to your views, and his.” In the midst of my many cares, I have not seen, or asked to see, Gen. McClellan’s letter to you. For my own views, I have not offered, and do not now offer them as orders; and while I am glad to have them respectfully considered, I would blame you to follow them contrary to your own clear judgment—unless I should put them in the form of orders. As to Gen. McClellan’s views, you understand your duty in regard to them better than I do. With this preliminary, I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much. To illustrate, suppose last summer, when Winchester ran away to re-inforce Mannassas, we had forborne to attack Mannassas, but had seized and held Winchester. I mention this to illustrate, and not to criticise. I did not lose confidence in McDowell, and I think less harshly of Patterson than some others seem to. In application of the general rule I am suggesting, every particular case will have its modifying circumstances, among which the most constantly present, and most difficult to meet, will be the want of perfect knowledge of the enemies’ movements. This had it’s part in the Bull-Run case; but worse, in that case, was the expiration of the terms of the three months men. Applying the principle to your case, my idea is that Halleck shall menace Columbus, and “down river” generally; while you menace Bowling-Green, and East Tennessee. If the enemy shall concentrate at Bowling-Green, do not retire from his front; yet do not fight him there, either, but seize Columbus and East Tennessee, one or both, left exposed by the concentration at Bowling Green. It is matter of no small anxiety to me and one which I am sure you will not over-look, that the East Tennessee line, is so long, and over so bad a road.
 
Yours very truly
A. LINCOLN.

Annual Message (December 6, 1864)

Ranking

#100 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“… At the last session of Congress a proposed amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States, passed the Senate, but failed for lack of the requisite two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives. Although the present is the same Congress, and nearly the same members, and without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition, I venture to recommend the reconsideration and passage of the measure at the present session. Of course the abstract question is not changed; but an intervening election shows, almost certainly, that the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 6, 1864

The Lincoln Log, December 6, 1864

 Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-23 at 5.25.18 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln’s chief legislative goal in the aftermath of the election was to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery throughout the country. It failed in June to win the requisite two-thirds majority of the House and did not become a significant issue in the presidential campaign, for Republicans soft-pedaled it while Democrats focused on miscegenation, civil liberties, conscription, and Lincoln’s Niagara Manifesto. Voters assumed that Congress would not address the amendment again until the members elected in 1864 took their seats in December 1865, and so they did not consider it a pressing matter. Thus the president’s reelection could not legitimately be interpreted as a mandate for the amendment. Yet in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln did just that, boldly claiming that the electorate had endorsed the amendment: “It is the voice of the people now, for the first time, heard upon the question.” And so he urged the immediate passage of the stalled measure. In justifying such action, Lincoln noted that the ‘next Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?’ . . .Lincoln’s motives in urging passage of the amendment were partly political, for he evidently calculated that it might help heal the breach in the Republican ranks by rendering moot the thorny question of whether Congress had the power to abolish slavery by statute. Moreover, with the slavery issue solved, some Democrats might be more willing to join the Republicans, who had been able to win in 1860 and 1864 only because of highly unusual circumstances.”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 35 (PDF), pp. 3871-3873

 

“In his last annual message on December 6, 1864, Lincoln, adverting to his party’s success in the November election, urged Congress to pass the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Saying the election results were the voice of the people speaking for a common end, he declared, ‘In this case the common end is the maintenance of the Union.’ When did Lincoln determine it was necessary to amend the Constitution to prohibit slavery throughout the whole nation? Replying to the committee notifying him of his re-nomination, Lincoln on June 9, 1864, said, ‘When the people in revolt, with a hundred days of explicit notice, that they could, within those days, resume their allegiance, without the overthrow of their institution, and that they could not so resume it afterwards, elected to stand out, such an amendment of the Constitution as is now proposed, became a fitting, and necessary conclusion to the final success of the Union cause.’ He was saying that not until January 1, 1863, did the need for national abolition arise.”

James A Rawley, “The Nationalism of Abraham Lincoln Revisited,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 22 (2001) 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

… At the last session of Congress a proposed amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States, passed the Senate, but failed for lack of the requisite two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives. Although the present is the same Congress, and nearly the same members, and without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition, I venture to recommend the reconsideration and passage of the measure at the present session. Of course the abstract question is not changed; but an intervening election shows, almost certainly, that the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better? It is not claimed that the election has imposed a duty on members to change their views or their votes, any further than, as an additional element to be considered, their judgment may be affected by it. It is the voice of the people now, for the first time, heard upon the question. In a great national crisis, like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable—almost indispensable. And yet no approach to such unanimity is attainable, unless some deference shall be paid to the will of the majority, simply because it is the will of the majority. In this case the common end is the maintenance of the Union; and, among the means to secure that end, such will, through the election, is most clearly declared in favor of such constitutional amendment.
The most reliable indication of public purpose in this country is derived through our popular elections. Judging by the recent canvass and its result, the purpose of the people, within the loyal States, to maintain the integrity of the Union, was never more firm, nor more nearly unanimous, than now. The extraordinary calmness and good order with which the millions of voters met and mingled at the polls, give strong assurance of this. Not only all those who supported the Union ticket, so called, but a great majority of the opposing party also, may be fairly claimed to entertain, and to be actuated by, the same purpose. It is an unanswerable argument to this effect, that no candidate for any office whatever, high or low, has ventured to seek votes on the avowal that he was for giving up the Union. There have been much impugning of motives, and much heated controversy as to the proper means and best mode of advancing the Union cause; but on the distinct issue of Union or no Union, the politicians have shown their instinctive knowledge that there is no diversity among the people. In affording the people the fair opportunity of showing, one to another and to the world, this firmness and unanimity of purpose, the election has been of vast value to the national cause.
The  election has exhibited another fact not less valuable to be known—the fact that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch of national resources—that of living men. While it is melancholy to reflect that the war has filled so many graves, and carried mourning to so many hearts, it is some relief to know that, compared with the surviving, the fallen have been so few. While corps, and divisions, and brigades, and regiments have formed, and fought, and dwindled, and gone out of existence, a great majority of the men who composed them are still living. The same is true of the naval service. The election returns prove this. So many voters could not else be found. The States regularly holding elections, both now and four years ago, to wit, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin cast 3.982.011 votes now, against 3.870.222 cast then, showing an aggregate now of 3.982.011. To this is to be added 33.762 cast now in the new States of Kansas and Nevada, which States did not vote in 1860, thus swelling the aggregate to 4.015.773 and the net increase during the three years and a half of war to 145.551. A table is appended showing particulars. To this again should be added the number of all soldiers in the field from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, and California, who, by the laws of those States, could not vote away from their homes, and which number cannot be less than 90.000. Nor yet is this all. The number in organized Territories is triple now what it was four years ago, while thousands, white and black, join us as the national arms press back the insurgent lines. So much is shown, affirmatively and negatively, by the election. It is not material to inquire how the increase has been produced, or to show that it would have been greater but for the war, which is probably true. The important fact remains demonstrated, that we have more mennow than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever.
The national resources, then, are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible. The public purpose to re-establish and maintain the national authority is unchanged, and, as we believe, unchangeable. The manner of continuing the effort remains to choose. On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft-repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are beaten; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten. Either way, it would be the victory and defeat following war. What is true, however, of him who heads the insurgent cause, is not necessarily true of those who follow. Although he cannot reaccept the Union, they can. Some of them, we know, already desire peace and reunion. The number of such may increase. They can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution. After so much, the government could not, if it would, maintain war against them. The loyal people would not sustain or allow it. If questions should remain, we would adjust them by the peaceful means of legislation, conference, courts, and votes, operating only in constitutional and lawful channels. Some certain, and other possible, questions are, and would be, beyond the Executive power to adjust; as, for instance, the admission of members into Congress, and whatever might require the appropriation of money. The Executive power itself would be greatly diminished by the cessation of actual war. Pardons and remissions of forfeitures, however, would still be within Executive control. In what spirit and temper this control would be exercised can be fairly judged of by the past….

 

Letter to John Stuart (January 23, 1841)

Ranking

#101 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 23, 1841

The Lincoln Log, January 23, 1841

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-23 at 5.31.51 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“In fact, Lincoln went ‘crazy for a week or so’ and was nursed back to health at the Butlers’ home, where his friend Orville H. Browning was staying. Browning said his friend ‘was so much affected as to talk incoherently, and to be delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing.’ This ‘aberration of mind resulted entirely from the situation he . . . got himself into – he was engaged to Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word which he had committed.’ Many friends, including James H. Matheny, ‘thought L[incoln] would commit suicide.’ They ‘had to remove razors from his room – take away all Knives and other such dangerous things – &c – it was terrible.’ Joshua Speed wrote that ‘a gloom came over him till his friends were alarmed for his life.’ According to Speed, Lincoln wrote a poem about suicide and declared that he ‘would be more than willing’ to die, but, he said, ‘I have an irrepressible desire to live till I can be assured that the world is a little better for my having lived in it.'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 6 (PDF), pp. 547-548

“Though he had earlier longed to end his commitment to Mary Todd, he now began to suspect. . .that he loved her more than he had thought.  Even more important, he was haunted by ‘the never-absent idea’ that he had made Mary unhappy. . . Losing both his only intimate friend and his fiancée within a matter of days was more than Lincoln could bear, and he collapsed.  Taking to his bed for about a week, he was unwilling to see anyone except his doctor and Speed, who had not yet left for Kentucky.  Years later, Speed said he thought Lincoln might commit suicide. . . Just what specific advice Speed offered his friend is unknown, but my guess is that he told Lincoln that he should either end his relationship with Mary Todd or marry her.  Lincoln acknowledged the correctness of the advice but could not act on it.  Unable to make a choice, he was, as he wrote his law partner, John T. Stuart, ‘the most miserable man living. . .’ More than a year later, he still could not decide.  ‘Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other,’ he confessed to Speed, ‘I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made.'”

David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 44-45

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Jany. 23rd. 1841- Springfield, Ills.
 
Dear Stuart: 
Yours of the 3rd. Inst. is recd. & I proceed to answer it as well as I can, tho’ from the deplorable state of my mind at this time,  I fear I shall give you but little satisfaction. About the matter of the congressional election, I can only tell you, that there is a bill now before the Senate adopting the General Ticket system; but whether the party have fully determined on it’s adoption is yet uncertain. There is no sign of opposition to you among our friends, and none that I can learn among our enemies; tho’, of course, there will be, if the Genl. Ticket be adopted. The Chicago American, Peoria Register, & Sangamo Journal, have already hoisted your flag upon their own responsibility; & the other whig papers of the District are expected to follow immediately. On last evening there was a meeting of our friends at Butler’s; and I submitted the question to them & found them unanamously in favour of having you announced as a candidate. A few of us this morning, however, concluded, that as you were already being announced in the papers, we would delay announcing you, as by your own authority for a week or two. We thought that to appear too keen about it might spur our opponents on about their Genl. Ticket project. Upon the whole, I think I may say with certainty, that your reelection is sure, if it be in the power of the whigs to make it so.
 
For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say, unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this, because I fear I shall be unable to attend to any bussiness here, and a change of scene might help me. If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write no more.
 
Your friend, as ever—
A. LINCOLN

Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)

Ranking

#103 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, July 1, 1854

The Lincoln Log, July 1, 1854

Custom Map

1854-07-01 Fragment
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

 

“Some said government should do no more than protect its people from insurrection and foreign invasion and spend the rest of its time dispassionately observing the way its people played out the cards that fate had dealt them. He scorned that view. He called it a ‘do nothing’ abdication of responsibility. ‘The legitimate object of government,’ he said, ‘is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves. There are many such things…,’ he said.  So he offered the ‘poor’ more than freedom and the encouragement of his own good example: he offered them government. Government that would work aggressively to help them find the chance they might not have found alone. He did it by fighting for bridges, railroad construction and other such projects that others decried as excessive government. He gave help for education, help for agriculture, land for the rural family struggling for a start.  And always, at the heart of his struggle and his yearning was the passion to make room for the outsider, the insistence upon a commitment to respect the idea of equality by fighting for inclusion.”

Mario M. Cuomo (governor of New York), “Abraham Lincoln and Our ‘Unfinished Work’” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 8.1 (1986)

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.
 
In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
 
The desirable things which the individuals of a people can not do, or can not well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.
 
The first—that in relation to wrongs—embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.
 
From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

Letter to John Dix (January 14, 1863)

Ranking

#104 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“The proclamation has been issued. We were not succeeding—at best, were progressing too slowly—without it. Now, that we have it, and bear all the disadvantage of it, (as we do bear some in certain quarters) we must also take some benefit from it, if practicable.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 14, 1863

The Lincoln Log, January 14, 1863

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 2.20.51 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“By spring the President was urging a massive recruitment of Negro troops.  When neither General Butler not General Fremont accepted his offer to go South and raise a black army, Lincoln turned directly to men already in the field.  ‘The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,’ he reminded Andrew Johnson, whom he had appointed military governor of Tennessee, and he urged Johnson to take the lead in raising a force of black troops.  ‘The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi,’ he predicted, ‘would end the rebellion at once.'”

–David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 431

 

“Before he implemented his matured political strategy he moved to adopt a measure which was an extension and logical consequence of his Emancipation Proclamation. He announced that those blacks freed by the proclamation would ‘be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places.’ In this way Lincoln planned for manpower difficulties to be significantly eased by tapping this new source of soldiers, ‘the great available and as yet unavailed of, force for the restoration of the Union.’ Arming southern blacks most effectively harmonized with the basic anaconda strategy because Lincoln saw that it worked ‘doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us,’ for it took ‘so much labor from the insurgent cause, and supplying the places which otherwise must be filled with so many white men.’ Lincoln correctly believed that the program weakened the enemy in another way: psychologically. He thought that ‘the bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.’ He did not believe that the rebellion could survive if such a black military force could ‘take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the South.'”

Herman Hattaway, “Lincoln’s Presidential Example in Dealing with the Military,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 7.1 (1985)

 

“In justifying his hesitancy to endorse the recruitment of black troops and to issue the order of retaliation, Lincoln (according to Douglass) ‘said that the country needed talking up to that point. He hesitated in regard to it when he felt that the country was not ready for it. He knew that the colored man throughout this country was a despised man, a hated man, and he knew that if he at first came out with such a proclamation, all the hatred which is poured on the head of the negro race would be visited on his Administration. He said that there was preparatory work needed, and that that preparatory work had been done.’ He described that ‘preparatory work’ accomplished by black troops: ‘Remember this, Mr. Douglass; remember that Milliken’s Bend, Port Hudson, and Fort Wagner are recent events; and that these were necessary to prepare the way for this very proclamation of mine.’ If he had issued it earlier, he said, ‘such was the state of public popular prejudice that an outcry would have been raised against the measure. It would be said ‘Ah! We thought it would come to this. White men are to be killed for negroes.’'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 30 (PDF), pp. 3371-3372

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Private & confidential
Executive Mansion, Washington,
January 14, 1863.
 
Major General Dix
 
My dear Sir:
The proclamation has been issued. We were not succeeding—at best, were progressing too slowly—without it. Now, that we have it, and bear all the disadvantage of it, (as we do bear some in certain quarters) we must also take some benefit from it, if practicable. I therefore will thank you for your well considered opinion whether Fortress-Monroe, and York-Town, one or both, could not, in whole or in part, be garrisoned by colored troops, leaving the white forces now necessary at those places, to be employed elsewhere.
Yours very truly
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Fillmore Men (September 8, 1856)

Ranking

#105 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I understand you are a Fillmore man. Let me prove to you that every vote withheld from Fremont, and given to Fillmore, in this state, actually lessens Fillmore’s chance of being President.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, September 8, 1856

The Lincoln Log, September 8, 1856

 Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 2.27.42 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln recognized that the Republican party faced formidable problems in the 1856 presidential contest.  Not only was it a new and imperfectly articulated organization, but it had powerful competition. . .The nativists, now calling themselves the American party, nominated ex-President Millard Fillmore, whose highly respectable Whig antecedents made him attractive to conservatives of all persuasions. . .Lincoln offered low-key, reasonable arguments to persuade American voters opposed to the expansion of slavery not to waste their votes on Fillmore, who had no chance of winning.  In private letters to old Whig friends, Lincoln made the same argument, stressing that a vote for Fillmore was really a vote for Buchanan. . .What effect Lincoln had on the outcome of the 1856 election in Illinois was hard for him or anybody else to determine.  In Republican newspapers his speeches were invariably praised as ‘unanswerable,’ showing ‘great eloquence and power.’  Democratic papers described his speeches as ‘prosy and dull in the extreme.’  He himself was under no illusions about the impact of his campaigning. . .In the end, the canvass verified the prediction Lincoln had made at the start: ‘With the Fremont and Fillmore men united, here in Illinois, we have Mr. Buchanan in the hollow of our hand; but with us divided, . . . he has us.'”

–David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 192-194

“On September 8, Lincoln wrote a form letter to the supporters of the American party’s candidate, arguing that Fillmore could only win if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives, where the former president might prevail as a compromise candidate. But that would never happen if Buchanan carried Illinois, whose electoral votes, when combined with those of the South and of the Democratic standard bearer’s home state of Pennsylvania, would assure his election. Therefore Fillmore backers in Illinois should vote for Frémont because Fillmore had no chance of carrying the state.”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 11 (PDF), pp. 1213

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Springfield, Sept. 8, 1856
 
Dear Sir, 
I understand you are a Fillmore man. Let me prove to you that every vote withheld from Fremont, and given to Fillmore, in this state, actually lessens Fillmore’s chance of being President.
 
Suppose Buchanan gets all the slave states, and Pennsylvania, andany other one state besides; then he is elected, no matter who gets all the rest.
 
But suppose Fillmore gets the two slave states of Maryland and Kentucky; then Buchanan is not elected; Fillmore goes into the House of Representatives, and may be made President by a compromise.
 
But suppose again Fillmore’s friends throw away a few thousand votes on him, in Indiana and Illinois, it will inevitably give these states to Buchanan, which will more than compensate him for the loss of Maryland and Kentucky; will elect him, and leave Fillmore no chance in the H.R. or out of it.
 
This is as plain as the adding up of the weights of three small hogs. As Mr. Fillmore has no possible chance to carry Illinois for himself, it is plainly his interest to let Fremont take it, and thus keep it out of the hands of Buchanan. Be not deceived. Buchanan is the hard horse to beat in this race. Let him have Illinois, and nothing can beat him; and he will get Illinois, if men persist in throwing away votes upon Mr. Fillmore.
 
Does some one persuade, you that Mr. Fillmore can carry Illinois? Nonsense! There are over seventy newspapers in Illinois opposing Buchanan, only three or four of which support Mr. Fillmore, all the rest going for Fremont. Are not these newspapers a fair index of the proportion of the voters. If not, tell me why.
 
Again, of these three or four Fillmore newspapers, two at least, are supported, in part, by the Buchanan men, as I understand. Do not they know where the shoe pinches? They know the Fillmore movement helps them, and therefore they help it.
 
Do think these things over, and then act according to your judgment.
Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN
 
(Confidential)

Speech at Columbus (September 16, 1859)

Ranking

#106 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“…The Giant himself has been here recently. [Laughter.] I have seen a brief report of his speech. If it were otherwise unpleasant to me to introduce the subject of the negro as a topic for discussion, I might be somewhat relieved by the fact that he dealt exclusively in that subject while he was here. I shall, therefore, without much hesitation or diffidence, enter upon this subject.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, September 16, 1859

The Lincoln Log, September 16, 1859

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 2.33.04 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln found Douglas’s activities decidedly threatening.  Considering the Little Giant ‘the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious one,’ he readily accepted an invitation from the Ohio Republican state central committee to participate in the campaign and thus ‘to head off the little gentleman.’  He did not appear on the same platform with Douglas in Ohio, but his speeches at Columbus, Dayton, Hamilton, and Cincinnati (September 16–17), as well as one he delivered in Indianapolis two days later, were, in effect, continuations of the 1858 debates.  For the  most part, Lincoln presented arguments that he had advanced during those debates, but he was now freer in his criticisms of Douglas.”

–David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 233

 

“Lincoln refined his nationalist ideology in response to Douglas’s September 1859 essay in Harper’s Magazine. Seeking to justify the policy of popular sovereignty, Douglas contended that the founders had enshrined the principle of local self-government in the Constitution and early territorial law.  From this basis, Douglas argued that Congress could confer—but not exercise—powers over a territory’s “domestic affairs,” most notably slavery.  Although Lincoln considered the essay a gross perversion of American history and a dangerous philosophical defense of slavery, it gave him another ideal opportunity to define Republican politics by combating Douglas.  In a series of speeches given in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin in September, and Kansas in December, Lincoln took issue with Douglas’s historical argument.  At Columbus, he developed ideas broached briefly in a speech at Carlinville a year earlier, claiming that the Republicans’ ‘original and chief purpose’ was the ’eminently conservative’ object of preventing slavery’s nationalization.  He explained that the Republicans promised ‘to restore this government to its original tone,’ desiring no more in relation to slavery ‘than that which the original framers of the government themselves expected.’  Despite his professed conservatism, these arguments were no more than a freshly minted version of his ultimate extinction doctrine.  After all, he maintained that the founders had intended freedom’s nationalization.  He observed that the Constitution’s authors had avoided the words ‘slave or slavery’ because they expected slavery’s extinction, and he argued that passage of the Northwest Ordinance evinced the founders’ intention to slowly kill it.  Lincoln built on this argument by fusing antislavery nationalism to the interests of free society.  He pointed out that Indiana’s settlers unsuccessfully petitioned the government at an early date to suspend the antislavery provision of the Northwest Ordinance, and he argued that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois would all likely have become slave states had the Ordinance not warded off slaveholders.  As proof, he observed that slavery now flourished on one side of the Ohio River but not on the other.  The nation’s history thus demonstrated that law, rather than climate, determined slavery’s spread.  Reasoning from this proposition, Lincoln invoked free labor arguments to demonstrate the need for antislavery law.  Comparing the ‘mud-sill’ theory of labor, in which laborers were fixed in their position for life, and free labor, in which laborers accumulated capital throughout their life, Lincoln contended that free labor was a ‘just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.’  To Lincoln, slavery deliberately destroyed the “inspiration of hope” required for ‘human exertion,’ while free labor encouraged men to innovate and excel.  Given these considerations, he urged northerners to return to the ideals that served their interests. In his estimation, progress was ‘the order of things’ only in ‘a society of equals.’  Never before had Lincoln so completely conflated northern interests and American nationalism.”

Graham Alexander Peck, “Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of an Antislavery Nationalism,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 28.2 (2007)

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

…The Giant himself has been here recently. [Laughter.] I have seen a brief report of his speech. If it were otherwise unpleasant to me to introduce the subject of the negro as a topic for discussion, I might be somewhat relieved by the fact that he dealt exclusively in that subject while he was here. I shall, therefore, without much hesitation or diffidence, enter upon this subject.
The American people, on the first day of January, 1854, found the African slave trade prohibited by a law of Congress. In a majority of the States of this Union, they found African slavery, or any other sort of slavery, prohibited by State constitutions. They also found a law existing, supposed to be valid, by which slavery was excluded from almost all the territory the United States then owned. This was the condition of the country, with reference to the institution of slavery, on the 1st of January, 1854. A few days after that, a bill was introduced into Congress, which ran through its regular course in the two branches of the National Legislature, and finally passed into a law in the month of May, by which the act of Congress prohibiting slavery from going into the territories of the United States was repealed. In connection with the law itself, and, in fact, in the terms of the law, the then existing prohibition was not only repealed, but there was a declaration of a purpose on the part of Congress never thereafter to exercise any power that they might have, real or supposed, to prohibit the extension or spread of slavery. This was a very great change; for the law thus repealed was of more than thirty years’ standing. Following rapidly upon the heels of this action of Congress, a decision of the Supreme Court is made, by which it is declared that Congress, if it desires to prohibit the spread of slavery into the territories, has no constitutional power to do so. Not only so, but that decision lays down principles, which, if pushed to their logical conclusion—I say pushed to their logical conclusion—would decide that the constitutions of the Free States, forbidding slavery, are themselves unconstitutional. Mark me, I do not say the judge[s?] said this, and let no man say that I affirm the judge[s?] used these words; but I only say it is my opinion that what they did say, if pressed to its logical conclusion, will inevitably result thus. [Cries of “Good! good!”]
Looking at these things, the Republican party, as I understand its principles and policy, believe that there is great danger of the institution of slavery being spread out and extended, until it is ultimately made alike lawful in all the States of this Union; so believing, to prevent that incidental and ultimate consummation, is the original and chief purpose of the Republican organization. I say “chief purpose” of the Republican organization; for it is certainly true that if the national House shall fall into the hands of the Republicans, they will have to attend to all the other matters of national house-keeping, as well as this. This chief and real purpose of the Republican party is eminently conservative. It proposes nothing save and except to restore this government to its original tone in regard to this element of slavery, and there to maintain it, looking for no further change, in reference to it, than that which the original framers of the government themselves expected and looked forward to.
The chief danger to this purpose of the Republican party is not just now the revival of the African slave trade, or the passage of a Congressional slave code, or the declaring of a second Dred Scott decision, making slavery lawful in all the States. These are not pressing us just now. They are not quite ready yet. The authors of these measures know that we are too strong for them; but they will be upon us in due time, and we will be grappling with them hand to hand, if they are not now headed off. They are not now the chief danger to the purpose of the Republican organization; but the most imminent danger that now threatens that purpose is that insidious Douglas Popular Sovereignty. This is the miner and sapper. While it does not propose to revive the African slave trade, nor to pass a slave code, nor to make a second Dred Scott decision, it is preparing us for the onslaught and charge of these ultimate enemies when they shall be ready to come on and the word of command for them to advance shall be given. I say this Douglas Popular Sovereignty—for there is a broad distinction, as I now understand it, between that article and a genuine popular sovereignty.
I believe there is a genuine popular sovereignty. I think a definition of genuine popular sovereignty, in the abstract, would be about this: That each man shall do precisely as he pleases with himself, and with all those things which exclusively concern him. Applied to government, this principle would be, that a general government shall do all those things which pertain to it, and all the local governments shall do precisely as they please in respect to those matters which exclusively concern them. I understand that this government of the United States, under which we live, is based upon this principle; and I am misunderstood if it is supposed that I have any war to make upon that principle.
Now, what is Judge Douglas’ Popular Sovereignty? It is, as a principle, no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object. [Cheers and laughter.] Applied in government, as he seeks to apply it, it is this: If, in a new territory into which a few people are beginning to enter for the purpose of making their homes, they choose to either exclude slavery from their limits, or to establish it there, however one or the other may affect the persons to be enslaved, or the infinitely greater number of persons who are afterward to inhabit that territory, or the other members of the families of communities, of which they are but an incipient member, or the general head of the family of States as parent of all—however their action may affect one or the other of these, there is no power or right to interfere. That is Douglas’ popular sovereignty applied….
…It is to be a part and parcel of this same idea, to say to men who want to adhere to the Democratic party, who have always belonged to that party, and are only looking about for some excuse to stick to it, but nevertheless hate slavery, that Douglas’ Popular Sovereignty is as good a way as any to oppose slavery. They allow themselves to be persuaded easily in accordance with their previous dispositions, into this belief, that it is about as good a way of opposing slavery as any, and we can do that without straining our old party ties or breaking up old political associations. We can do so without being called negro worshippers. We can do that without being subjected to the jibes and sneers that are so readily thrown out in place of argument where no argument can be found; so let us stick to this Popular Sovereignty—this insidious Popular Sovereignty. Now let me call your attention to one thing that has really happened, which shows this gradual and steady debauching of public opinion, this course of preparation for the revival of the slave trade, for the territorial slave code, and the new Dred Scott decision that is to carry slavery into the free States. Did you ever five years ago, hear of anybody in the world saying that the negro had no share in the Declaration of National Independence; that it did not mean negroes at all; and when “all men” were spoken of negroes were not included?
I am satisfied that five years ago that proposition was not put upon paper by any living being anywhere. I have been unable at any time to find a man in an audience who would declare that he had ever known any body saying so five years ago. But last year there was not a Douglas popular sovereign in Illinois who did not say it. Is there one in Ohio but declares his firm belief that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes at all? I do not know how this is; I have not been here much; but I presume you are very much alike everywhere. Then I suppose that all now express the belief that the Declaration of Independence never did mean negroes. I call upon one of them to say that he said it five years ago.
If you think that now, and did not think it then, the next thing that strikes me is to remark that there has been a change wrought in you (laughter and applause), and a very significant change it is, being no less than changing the negro, in your estimation, from the rank of a man to that of a brute. They are taking him down, and placing him, when spoken of, among reptiles and crocodiles, as Judge Douglas himself expresses it.
Is not this change wrought in your minds a very important change? Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it.
Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on, layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings will be ready for all these things, and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade; revived with all its horrors; a slave code enforced in our territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North. This, I must say, is but carrying out those words prophetically spoken by Mr. Clay, many, many years ago. I believe more than thirty years when he told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate the love of liberty; but until they did these things, and others eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to ultimate emancipation.
I ask attention to the fact that in a pre-eminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of the Ohio Republicans, or Democrats if there be any present, the serious consideration of this fact, that there is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject. With this my friends, I bid you adieu.

Letter to Thomas Corwin (October 9, 1859)

Contributing Editors for this page include Jim Coe

Ranking

#108 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

Annotated Transcript

We must have though a man who recognizes the slavery issue as being the living issue of the day; who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong, nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it. 

On This Date

HD Daily Report, October 9, 1859

The Lincoln Log, October 9, 1859

Close Readings

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-02-02 at 4.32.51 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Despite his modesty, Lincoln between August 1859 and March 1860 positioned himself for a presidential run by giving speeches and corresponding with party leaders in several states, among them Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Kansas.  At the same time, he labored to keep Republicans true to their principles by having them steer a middle course between the Scylla of Douglas’s popular sovereignty and the Charybdis of radical abolitionism.  Only thus could he and his party capture the White House.  And only thus could a lesser-known Moderate like himself lead the ticket.  Lincoln took encouragement from the ever-widening rift in the Democratic party over such issues as a federal slave code for the territories and the reopening of the African slave trade.  To Herndon and others he said, in substance: ‘an explosion must come in the near future. Douglas is a great man in his way and has quite unlimited power over the great mass of his party, especially in the North.  If he goes to the Charleston Convention [of the national Democratic party in 1860], which he will do, he, in a kind of spirit of revenge, will split the Convention wide open and give it the devil; & right here is our future success or rather the glad hope of it.’ Herndon recalled that Lincoln ‘prayed for this state of affairs,’ for ‘he saw in it his opportunity and wisely played his line.'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 14 (PDF), pp. 1525

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Confidential

Springfield, Oct. 9, 1859

Hon. Thomas Corwin

My dear Sir:

Reaching home yesterday I for the first received yours of Sept. 24.  I reply in a hurry, because of the sentence in your letter, in these words, “I was sorry to hear from you, that a moderate man on our side would lose Illinois by 50,000.”  Whether you understood me as having said this in the speech at Cincinnati, or somehow else, I am not certain; but I am certain I have not meant to say it anywhere.  I did say at Cincinnati, that a candidate who shall turn up his nose at the Republican cause, could not carry Illinois by 50,000, but I am not considering such a man as “a moderate man on our side.”  I understand such a man as not being on our side at all; and as seeking to drive us to abandon our side ourselves.  They know we would organize to prevent the spread and nationalizing of Slavery; and yet they tell us they are tired of this view, and they invite us to abandon this view, and to join them against the Administration on the tariff, extravagances, live oak contracts, and the like –the very old issues upon which the whig party was beat out of existence.  Now I have expressed, and today repeat, that such an arrangement would lose Illinois by 50,000.  The thing is pretense.  The whigs here were in a minority of 15,000.  A full fifth of them have openly gone over to the enemy; still last year the Republicans had a large plurality, and very nearly a clear majority.  How was this?  Simply that more democratshave gone with us, than whigs have gone against us.  What brought these democrats with us?  The Slavery issue.  Drop that issue and they have no motive to remain, and will not remain with us.  It is idiotic to think otherwise. 

 

Do you understand me as saying Illinois must have an extreme anti-slavery candidate?  I do not so mean.  We must have though a man who recognizes the slavery issue as being the living issue of the day; who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong, nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it.  It would be unfavorable to us, I think, to have one who is bent on having a “rumpus” over the Fugitive Slave Law.  The present law I do not think is a very seemly one, but I do think an efficient fugitive slave law is demanded [by] the Constitution.  I said this is in the canvass last year; and I said nearly the same in the Cincinnati speech.  But I think you understand me.

 

Yours very truly,

A. Lincoln

Letter to Cuthbert Bullitt (July 28, 1862)

Ranking

#112 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“If they will not do this, if they prefer to hazard all for the sake of destroying the government, it is for them to consider whether it is probable I will surrender the government to save them from losing all. If they decline what I suggest, you scarcely need to ask what I will do. What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, July 28, 1862

The Lincoln Log, July 28, 1862

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 3.33.11 PM
View in Larger Map 

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln had no intention of feeding the robust Washington rumor mill by letting his plan out piecemeal.  Rather he was looking to shape a platform that could be widely accepted in the spirit of national interest.  To consolidate support he often floated positions that rose above parochialism, promoting a larger ideal that could be embraced by everyone.  Sometimes he did it through his famous cornpone parables, and sometimes by directly challenging his interlocutors to view a situation from his perspective.  He used this latter ploy a few days before he encountered Lucien Waters.  When Cuthbert Bullitt, the U.S. marshal for Louisiana, passed on complaints that the administration’s contraband policies were disadvantaging Unionist slaveholders in the state, the president retorted: ‘What would you do in my position? … Would you give up the contest leaving any available means unapplied?’  Then, in a masterful argument, he subordinated all other interests to the prime goal.  Everything he did, Lincoln protested, was done for one reason: to uphold the Union.  ‘The truth is, that what is done, and omitted, about the slaves, is done and omitted on the same military necessity. … I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination.’  A few weeks later, Lincoln again moved to manage the public mindset when he published a similar response to a particularly critical New York Tribune piece by Horace Greeley, once more raising the Union above any other consideration.  Understanding that much of the citizenry needed justification for an action as bold as liberating the slaves, Lincoln made the one argument with which most everyone could agree.”

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “Brief Encounter:  A New York Cavalryman’s Striking Conversation with Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30.2 (2009)

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

PRIVATE
Washington D.C. July 28. 1862
 
Cuthbert Bullitt Esq 
New Orleans La. 
 
Sir: 
The copy of a letter addressed to yourself by Mr. Thomas J. Durant, has been shown to me. The writer appears to be an able, a dispassionate, and an entirely sincere man. The first part of the letter is devoted to an effort to show that the Secession Ordinance of Louisiana was adopted against the will of a majority of the people. This is probably true; and in that fact may be found some instruction. Why did they allow the Ordinance to go into effect? Why did they not assert themselves? Why stand passive and allow themselves to be trodden down by a minority? Why did they not hold popular meetings, and have a convention of their own, to express and enforce the true sentiment of the state? If preorganization was against them then, why not do this now, that the United States Army is present to protect them? The paralysis –the dead palsy-of the government in this whole struggle is, that this class of men will do nothing for the government, nothing for themselves, except demanding that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident!
Mr. Durant complains that in various ways the relation of master and slave is disturbed by the presence of our Army; and he considers it particularly vexatious that this, in part, is done under cover of an act of Congress, while constitutional guaranties are suspended on the plea of military necessity. The truth is, that what is done, and omitted, about slaves, is done and omitted on the same military necessity. It is a military necessity to have men and money; and we can get neither, in sufficient numbers, or amounts, if we keep from, or drive from, our lines, slaves coming to them. Mr. Durant cannot be ignorant of the pressure in this direction; nor of my efforts to hold it within bounds till he, and such as he shall have time to help themselves.
I am not posted to speak understandingly on all the police regulations of which Mr. Durant complains. If experience shows any one of them to be wrong, let them be set right. I think I can perceive, in the freedom of trade, which Mr. Durant urges, that he would relieve both friends and enemies from the pressure of the blockade. By this he would serve the enemy more effectively than the enemy is able to serve himself. I do not say or believe that to serve the enemy is the purpose of Mr. Durant; or that he is conscious of any purpose, other than national and patriotic ones. Still, if there were a class of men who, having no choice of sides in the contest, were anxious only to have quiet and comfort for themselves while it rages, and to fall in with the victorious side at the end of it, without loss to themselves, their advice as to the mode of conducting the contest would be precisely such as his is. He speaks of no duty—apparently thinks of none—resting upon Union men. He even thinks it injurious to the Union cause that they should be restrained in trade and passage without taking sides. They are to touch neither a sail nor a pump, but to be merely passengers,—dead-heads at that—to be carried snug and dry, throughout the storm, and safely landed right side up. Nay, more; even a mutineer is to go untouched lest these sacred passengers receive an accidental wound.
Of course the rebellion will never be suppressed in Louisiana, if the professed Union men there will neither help to do it, nor permit the government to do it without their help.
Now, I think the true remedy is very different from what is suggested by Mr. Durant. It does not lie in rounding the rough angles of the war, but in removing the necessity for the war. The people of Louisiana who wish protection to person and property, have but to reach forth their hands and take it. Let them, in good faith, reinaugurate the national authority, and set up a State Government conforming thereto under the constitution. They know how to do it, and can have the protection of the Army while doing it. The Army will be withdrawn so soon as such State government can dispense with its presence; and the people of the State can then upon the old Constitutional terms, govern themselves to their own liking. This is very simple and easy.
If they will not do this, if they prefer to hazard all for the sake of destroying the government, it is for them to consider whether it is probable I will surrender the government to save them from losing all. If they decline what I suggest, you scarcely need to ask what I will do. What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied.
I am in no boastful mood. I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination. I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing. 
Yours truly
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Henry Sibley (December 6, 1862)

Ranking

#113 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 6, 1862

The Lincoln Log, December 6, 1862

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 3.36.07 PM
 View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“A decisive victory by Sibley at Wood Lake on September 23 was the end of organized fighting by the Sioux in Minnesota.  Indians who remained hostile fled west, and friendly chiefs arranged for the release of white captives.  Large numbers of Sioux were captured or surrendered, and day by day more Indians, many of them on the point of starvation, gave themselves up.  Cries of vengeance filled the air, and a five-man military commission was quickly appointed to try the captive Indians.  The commission worked with great haste; in ten days it tried 392 prisoners, condemning 303 to death.  Pope and Sibley wanted the condemned men executed at once, and they telegraphed the names to Lincoln for confirmation of the sentences.  Lincoln would not move so precipitously; he directed that the full records of the trials be sent to him for review. . . It was not an easy question for Lincoln.  He decided finally to uphold the sentence of death for only thirty-nine of the convicted me, and on December 6 he sent Sibley their names.  He laid out the basis for his decision to the Senate.  ‘Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak, on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty, on the other,’ Lincoln said, ‘I caused a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females.  Contrary to my expectations, only two of this class were found.  I then directed a further examination, and a classification of all who were proven to have participated in massacres, as distinguished from participation in battles.’  One of the thirty-nine men was reprieved as the last minute; the thirty-eight were hanged at Mankato in a spectacle attended by a large crowd on December 26, 1862.”

Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 443-445

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Executive Mansion, Washington,  
December 6th. 1862.
 
Brigadier General H.H. Sibley 
St. Paul Minnesota. 
 
Ordered that of the Indians and Half-breeds sentenced to be hanged by the Military Commission, composed of Colonel Crooks, Lt. Colonel Marshall, Captain Grant, Captain Bailey, and Lieutenant Olin, and lately sitting in Minnesota, you cause to be executed on Friday the nineteenth day of December, instant, the following named, towit
“Te-he-hdo-ne-cha.”  No. 2. by the record.
“Tazoo” alias “Plan-doo-ta.” No. 4. by the record.
“Wy-a-tah-to-wah” No. 5 by the record.
“Hin-han-shoon-ko-yag.” No. 6 by the record.
“Muz-za-bom-a-du.” No. 10. by the record.
“Wah-pay-du-ta.” No. 11. by the record.
“Wa-he-hud.” No. 12. by the record.
“Sna-ma-ni.” No. 14. by the record.
“Ta-te-mi-na.” No. 15. by the record.
“Rda-in-yan-kna.” No. 19. by the record.
“Do-wan-sa.” No. 22. by the record.
“Ha-pan.” No. 24. by the record.
“Shoon-ka-ska.” (White Dog). No. 35. by the record.
“Toon-kan-e-chah-tay-mane.” No. 67. by the record.
“E-tay-hoo-tay.” No. 68. by the record.
“Am-da-cha.” No. 69. by the record.
“Hay-pee-don—or, Wamne-omne-ho-ta.” No. 70. by the record.
“Mahpe-o-ke-na-ji.” No. 96. by the record.
“Henry Milord”—a Half-breed. No. 115. by the record.
“Chaskay-don”—or Chaskayetay.” No. 121. by the record.
“Baptiste Campbell” a Halfbreed. No. 138. by the record.
“Tah-ta-kay-gay.” No. 155. by the record.
“Ha-pink-pa.” No. 170 by the record.
“Hypolite Ange” a Half-breed. No. 175 by the record.
“Na-pay-Shue.” No. 178. by the record.
“Wa-kan-tan-ka.” No. 210. by the record.
“Toon-kan-ka-yag-e-na-jin.” No. 225. by the record.
“Ma-kat-e-na-jin.” No. 254. by the record.
“Pa-zee-koo-tay-ma-ne.” No. 264. by the record.
“Ta-tay-hde-don.” No. 279. by the record.
“Wa-She-choon,” or “Toon-kan-shkan-shkan-mene-hay.” No. 318. by the record.
“A-e-cha-ga.”  No. 327. by the record.
“Ha-tan-in-koo.” No. 333. by the record.
“Chay-ton-hoon-ka.” No. 342. by the record.
“Chan-ka-hda.” No. 359. by the record.
“Hda-hin-hday.” No. 373. by the record.
“O-ya-tay-a-koo.” No. 377. by the record.
“May-hoo-way-wa.” No. 382. by the record.
“Wa-kin-yan-na.” No. 383 by the record
The other condemned prisoners you will hold subject to further orders, taking care that they neither escape, nor are subjected to any unlawful violence.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

Reply to Workingmen of Manchester (January 19, 1863)

Ranking

#114 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation rests solely with the American people. But I have at the same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence in enlarging and prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has seemed to authorize a belief that the past action and influences of the United States were generally regarded as having been beneficient towards mankind.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 19, 1863

The Lincoln Log, January 19, 1863

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-25 at 3.38.39 PM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln was keenly conscious of the tides of opinion throughout the world.  He was in full sympathy with liberal thought and he was eager to have the real nature of the cause for which his country was fighting understood by people everywhere.  In England a remarkable division of attitude had occurred.  The aristocracy, as has already been indicated, was in almost complete sympathy with the South, but the British working people were in hearty accord with the aims of the North.  Even the operators in the Lancashire mills, who were being starved as a result of the cotton shortage caused by the blockade, steadfastly supported the Union cause.  The working-men of Manchester addressed a letter to the President at the beginning of the new year 1863, enclosing a resolution of sympathy with the aims of the Northern Government.  On January 19, Lincoln answered them, saying that the example set by the Lancashire mill operators was ‘an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.’  The people of the Northern states, moved by the plight of the English factory hands, subscribed large sums of money for relief and sent shiploads of wheat to Liverpool.”

Philip Van Doren Stern, editor, The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Random House, 1940)

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Executive Mansion, Washington,
January 19, 1863.
 
To the workingmen of Manchester: 
I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the address and resolutions which you sent to me on the eve of the new year.
When I came, on the fourth day of March, 1861, through a free and constitutional election, to preside in the government of the United States, the country was found at the verge of civil war. Whatever might have been the cause, or whosoever the fault, one duty paramount to all others was before me, namely, to maintain and preserve at once the Constitution and the integrity of the federal republic. A conscientious purpose to perform this duty is a key to all the measures of administration which have been, and to all which will hereafter be pursued. Under our form of government, and my official oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem it necessary for the public safety, from time to time, to adopt.
I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation rests solely with the American people. But I have at the same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence in enlarging and prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has seemed to authorize a belief that the past action and influences of the United States were generally regarded as having been beneficient towards mankind. I have therefore reckoned upon the forbearance of nations. Circumstances, to some of which you kindly allude, induced me especially to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit of peace and amity towards this country may prevail in the councils of your Queen, who is respected and esteemed in your own country only more than she is by the kindred nation which has its home on this side of the Atlantic.
I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is, indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation, and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that, whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.    
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Remarks to Indians (March 27, 1863)

Ranking

#115 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

On This Date

HD Daily Report, March 27, 1863

The Lincoln Log, March 27, 1863

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 10.31.56 AM
View in Larger Map 

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln felt that, ideally, American should be white.  He explained to a black delegation in 1862 that the white and black races could not coexist in the nation, adding that the presence of blacks in America was currently causing white people to fight each other.  The next year, in March, Lincoln met with Indian leaders.  He had not known many Indians.  He began by  explaining that the world is round. . .He then considered the ‘great difference between this pale-faced people and their red brethren both as to numbers and the way in which they live.’  Indians, he said, live by hunting, whereas white people farm, and ‘I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do.’  Lincoln also told his Indian listeners of another difference between the two races: ‘Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.’  One might had thought that the carnage of a civil war between white people, widely understood as such at the time, would have undermined the belief in white civilization as superior, not to mention more peaceful—perhaps even have undermined the belief in whiteness itself.  White people were killing each other all around Lincoln; he was himself directing much of the killing; and so his seemingly mad assertion of the white race’s comparative amiability must have answered a deep need to take an observable, unattractive feature of white behavior and attribute it to another race.  If that race were removed from the nation, then would not the unwanted behavior cease as well?  In which case the white American race could advance to prosperity and reach that destiny uniquely its own.  The Civil War, however, was a truly American conflict; all three races fought on both sides.  A majority of Indians fought for the Confederacy. . .Yet Indians in the Northern ambit, and some without, fought for Lincoln. . . Everyone’s racial fate was in the balance during the Civil War. . .”

Scott Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 94-95

 

“Lincoln admitted that he was poorly informed on Indian affairs. . .In general, like most whites of his generation, he considered the Indians a barbarous people who were a barrier to progress.  The ceremonial visits of Indian chiefs, dressed in their tribal regalia, he welcomed, both because they were exotic and because he rather enjoyed playing the role of their Great Father, addressing them in pidgin English and explaining that ‘this world is a great, round ball.’  Occasionally, as during the following year, he would offer them little homilies on how they could profit by learning the ‘arts of civilization.’  Pointing out that the ‘great difference between this pale-faced people and their red brethren,’ he told a group in the White House that whites had become numerous and prosperous partly because they were farmers rather than hunters.  Even though he admitted that ‘we are now engaged in a great war between one another,’ he also offered another reason for white success: ‘We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill on another as our red brethren.’  The irony was unintentional.”

–David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 393

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

March 27, 1863
 
You have all spoken of the strange sights you see here, among your pale-faced brethren; the very great number of people that you see; the big wigwams; the difference between our people and your own. But you have seen but a very small part of the palefaced people. You may wonder when I tell you that there are people here in this wigwam, now looking at you, who have come from other countries a great deal farther off than you have come.
We pale-faced people think that this world is a great, round ball, and we have people here of the pale-faced family who have come almost from the other side of it to represent their nations here and conduct their friendly intercourse with us, as you now come from your part of the round ball.”
Here a globe was introduced, and the President, laying his hand upon it, said:
One of our learned men will now explain to you our notions about this great ball, and show you where you live.
Professor Henry then gave the delegation a detailed and interesting explanation of the formation of the earth, showing how much of it was water and how much was land; and pointing out the countries with which we had intercourse. He also showed them the position of Washington and that of their own country, from which they had come. The President then said:
We have people now present from all parts of the globe—here, and here, and here. There is a great difference between this palefaced people and their red brethren, both as to numbers and the way in which they live. We know not whether your own situation is best for your race, but this is what has made the difference in our way of living.
The pale-faced people are numerous and prosperous because they cultivate the earth, produce bread, and depend upon the products of the earth rather than wild game for a subsistence.
This is the chief reason of the difference; but there is another. Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.
You have asked for my advice. I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the Great Spirit, who is the great Father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life. I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth.
It is the object of this Government to be on terms of peace with you, and with all our red brethren. We constantly endeavor to be so. We make treaties with you, and will try to observe them; and if our children should sometimes behave badly, and violate these treaties, it is against our wish. You know it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do. In regard to being sent back to your own country, we have an officer, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who will take charge of that matter, and make the necessary arrangements.”
 
The President’s remarks were received with frequent marks of applause and approbation. “Ugh,” “Aha” sounded along the line as the interpreter proceeded, and their countenances gave evident tokens of satisfaction.

Telegram to Joseph Hooker (June 10, 1863)

Ranking

#116 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, June 10, 1863

The Lincoln Log, June 10, 1863

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 10.34.52 AM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lee was indeed planning to move into Pennsylvania.  He began to do so in the second week of June.  For the third time in thirteen months, Lincoln saw a Confederate offensive as an opportunity rather than a threat.  As he had done so during Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign in May 1862 and during Lee’s invasion of Maryland the previous September, the president urged his army commander to attack or trap the enemy far from his home base.  But as the Army of Northern Virginia began to march up the south bank of the Rappahannock toward the Shenandoah Valley,  Hooker proposed to attack the corps Lee had left as a rear guard in the trenches near Fredericksburg.  Both Lincoln and Halleck (whom the president brought into communication with Hooker) disapproved.  Halleck wanted Hooker to ‘fight [the enemy’s] movable column first, instead of attacking his intrenchments, with your own forces separated by the Rappahannock.’  Lincoln put it more colorfully, using a typically pointed simile.  When ‘you find Lee coming to the North of the Rappahannock, I would by no means cross to the South of it,’ advised the president.  ‘I would not take the risk of being entangled upon the river, like and ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and read, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick another.’  Five days later, when it became clear that Lee’s whole army was leaving Fredericksburg, Hooker requested Lincoln’s permission to move quickly fifty miles south to attack the lightly defended Richmond defenses.  ‘To march to Richmond at once,’ he said, would be ‘the most speedy and certain mode of giving the rebellion a mortal blow.’  Lincoln must have shaken his head in frustration when he read this telegram.  He immediately wired Hooker: ‘Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. . .’  By June 14 Union intelligence had learned that the Army of Northern Virginia was strung out almost sixty miles from Winchester back to Chancellorsville.  ‘The animal must be very slim somewhere,’ the president telegraphed Hooker.  ‘Could you not break him?'”

James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008)

 

“Ignoring this advice, Hooker on June 10 proposed to forget about Lee and march toward Richmond. Lincoln, who thought ‘it would be a very poor exchange to give Washington for Richmond,’ immediately vetoed that suggestion. ‘If left to me, I would not go South of the Rappahannock, upon Lee’s moving North of it,’ the president wrote. ‘If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days; meanwhile, your communications, and with them, your army would be ruined. I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. If he comes towards the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when oppertunity offers. If he stays where he is, fret him, and fret him.’ Alarmed by Hooker’s evident unwillingness to confront the enemy, Lincoln planned to visit the front to consult with him. But he aborted that trip when Stanton and Halleck warned that it was too perilous to visit the general’s ever-shifting headquarters when that area could become the scene of battle.”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 30  (PDF), 3338-3339.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

United States Military Telegraph
War Department. Washington DC.
“Cypher”
June 10. 1863. [6:40 P.M.]
 
Major General Hooker 
Your long despatch of to-day is just received. If left to me, I would not go South of the Rappahannock, upon Lee’s moving North of it. If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days; meanwhile, your communications, and with them, your army would be ruined. I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. If he comes towards the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when oppertunity offers. If he stays where he is, fret him, and fret him.
 A LINCOLN.

Letter to Mary Lincoln (June 16, 1863)

Ranking

#117 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“It is a matter of choice with yourself whether you come home. There is no reason why you should not, that did not exist when you went away. As bearing on the question of your coming home, I do not think the raid into Pennsylvania amounts to anything at all.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, June 16, 1863

The Lincoln Log, June 16, 1863

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 10.38.34 AM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“So little correspondence has survived between husband and wife that one is tempted to make much of a pittance.  It is irresistible because Lincoln chose his words so carefully.  Clearly she had asked whether she should come home; plainly he told her the war should not keep her away.  So his first two sentences are telling.  He would not order her to come home—it was not his way to order her about, any  more than it was her habit to submit.  The second, cryptic sentence addresses a great chasm between them.  Simply translated, it means that since she left, nothing has changed; and if she wanted to be apart from him before, it will be no different now.  The tone is distant and cool, not at all welcoming.”

Daniel Mark Epstein, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Ballentine Books, 2008), 396

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Washington City, D.C. 
June 16. 1863 
 
Mrs. Lincoln 
Philadelphia. 
It is a matter of choice with yourself whether you come home. There is no reason why you should not, that did not exist when you went away. As bearing on the question of your coming home, I do not think the raid into Pennsylvania amounts to anything at all 
A. LINCOLN

Address to Washington Temperance Society (February 22, 1842)

Ranking

#121 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“…Although the Temperance cause has been in progress for near twenty years, it is apparent to all, that it is, just now, being crowned with a degree of success, hitherto unparalleled.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, February 22, 1842

The Lincoln Log, February 22, 1842

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 10.53.54 AM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“On February 22, 1842, Lincoln addressed the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield with a speech that enlarged his discussion of reason and tyranny in the 1838 Lyceum Address.  His presentation was again ostensibly apolitical, though resonant with political implications.  Most notably, it added shadow and light to the portrait of human nature and the task of self-government that he had begun to produce four years before.  The Lyceum Address had sketched the disturbing advances of lawless passions and the arduous means with which their tyranny could be resisted by discovering unused resources of strength within American democracy.  The temperance issue presented the problem in one of its most common, dramatic, and destructive forms.  Alcohol was, after all, the proverbial fuel of anger and licentiousness, a notorious destroyer of self-governing activity.  Habitual drunkenness was therefore a form of slavery, perhaps one of its most damaging forms because it worked to destroy even the free man’s power to love liberty.  The temperance movement was, in Lincoln’s view, an opportunity to resist the encroachment of this broader tyranny—if temperance could be pursued without the movement itself becoming a tyrannical force.  There is much in this 1842 address to suggest that it served several purposes.  The antebellum champions of temperance had a strong philosophical affinity for the work of the antislavery cause.  In the late 1830s and early ’40s, both movement were centered in churches, from which they drew vehement supporters such as Edward Beecher.  In Illinois, the Presbyterians had played a major role in both movements, and it was in a Presbyterian church in Springfield that Lincoln spoke.  Temperance and abolition forces were often entwined up to the mid-1850s, when vote-seeking Republicans began to downplay antidrinking sentiments that had antagonized voters they hoped to recruit to their cause, especially Irish and German immigrants.  In the early 1840s, long before the emergence of the Republican Party, Lincoln’s brand of Whig politics explicitly favored attempts to alleviate the drinker’s plight and emphasized principles he would incorporate into the explicitly antislavery speeches he began to deliver in 1854.  The Temperance Address gave Lincoln an opportunity to venture, in a displaced context, ideas about emancipation and the prospects for a gradual abolition of slavery.”

John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 58-59

“Although the speech focuses ostensibly on temperance with regards to liquor, at bottom it is about temperance or moderation in speech—how citizens go about persuading one another on a given social or political issue.  A close reading of the address reveals that the subtext about persuasion, and not the overt teaching about temperance advocacy, is the more serious objective of Lincoln.  This becomes most evident when one looks at Lincoln’s own rhetoric, which fluctuates between plain, unornamented prose and florid, grandiose phrasing.  Curiously enough, his speech takes on its most flowery and exaggerated cast when he uses biblical language.  Lincoln’s Temperance Address, therefore, exhibits bot temperance and intemperance in its argument and leads the attentive listener or reader to draw conclusions about Lincoln’s opinion of the respective temperance reformers and the movement in general that are not obvious on a cursory hearing.”

Lucas E. Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2000), 128

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

Searchable Text

…Although the Temperance cause has been in progress for near twenty years, it is apparent to all, that it is, just now, being crowned with a degree of success, hitherto unparalleled.
The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory, to a living, breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth “conquering and to conquer.” The citadels of his great adversary are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temples and his altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been performed, and where human sacrifices have long been wont to be made, are daily desecrated and deserted. The trump of the conqueror’s fame is sounding from hill to hill, from sea to sea, and from land to land, and calling millions to his standard at a blast.
For this new and splendid success, we heartily rejoice. That that success is so much greater now than heretofore, is doubtless owing to rational causes; and if we would have it to continue, we shall do well to enquire what those causes are. The warfare heretofore waged against the demon of Intemperance, has, some how or other, been erroneous. Either the champions engaged, or the tactics they adopted, have not been the most proper. These champions for the most part, have been Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents. Between these and the mass of mankind, there is a want ofapproachability, if the term be admissible, partially at least, fatal to their success. They are supposed to have no sympathy of feeling or interest, with those very persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.
And again, it is so easy and so common to ascribe motives to men of these classes, other than those they profess to act upon. Thepreacher, it is said, advocates temperance because he is a fanatic, and desires a union of Church and State; the lawyer, from his pride and vanity of hearing himself speak; and the hired agent, for his salary. But when one, who has long been known as a victim of intemperance, bursts the fetters that have bound him, and appears before his neighbors “clothed, and in his right mind,” a redeemed specimen of long lost humanity, and stands up with tears of joy trembling in eyes, to tell of the miseries once endured, now to be endured no more forever; of his once naked and starving children, now clad and fed comfortably; of a wife long weighed down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored to health, happiness, and renewed affection; and how easily it all is done, once it is resolved to be done; however simple his language, there is a logic, and an eloquence in it, that few, with human feelings, can resist. They cannot say that he desires a union of church and state, for he is not a church member; they can not say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his whole demeanor shows, he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot say he speaks for pay for he receives none, and asks for none. Nor can his sincerity in any way be doubted; or his sympathy for those he would persuade to imitate his example, be denied.
In my judgment, it is to the battles of this new class of champions that our late success is greatly, perhaps chiefly, owing. But, had the old school champions themselves, been of the most wise selecting, was their system of tactics, the most judicious? It seems to me, it was not. Too much denunciation against dram sellers and dram-drinkers was indulged in. This, I think, was both impolitic and unjust. It was impolitic, because, it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to any thing; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own business; and least of all, where such driving is to be submitted to, at the expense of pecuniary interest, or burning appetite. When the dram-seller and drinker, were incessantly told, not in the accents of entreaty and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring brother; but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation, with which the lordly Judge often groups together all the crimes of the felon’s life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence of death upon him, that they were the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of all the thieves and robbers and murderers that infested the earth; that their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences—I say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful that they were slow, very slow, to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their denouncers, in a hue and cry against themselves.
To have expected them to do otherwise than as they did—to have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed. When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.
Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest.
On this point, the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance advocates of former times. Those whom they desire to convince and persuade, are their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons, nor even the worst of men. They know that generally, they are kind, generous and charitable, even beyond the example of their more staid and sober neighbors. They are practical philanthropists; and they glow with a generous and brotherly zeal, that mere theorizers are incapable of feeling. Benevolence and charity possess their hearts entirely; and out of the abundance of their hearts, their tongues give utterance. “Love through all their actions runs, and all their words are mild.”  In this spirit they speak and act, and in the same, they are heard and regarded. And when such is the temper of the advocate, and such of the audience, no good cause can be unsuccessful….
… If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be estimated by the great amount of human misery they alleviate, and the small amount they inflict, then, indeed, will this be the grandest the world shall ever have seen. Of our political revolution of ’76, we all are justly proud. It has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other of the nations of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of that long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself. In it was the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind.
But with all these glorious results, past, present, and to come, it had its evils too. It breathed forth famine, swam in blood and rode on fire; and long, long after, the orphan’s cry, and the widow’s wail, continued to break the sad silence that ensued. These were the price, the inevitable price, paid for the blessings it bought.
Turn now, to the temperance revolution. In it, we shall find a stronger bondage broken; a viler slavery, manumitted; a greater tyrant deposed. In it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged. By it no orphans starving, no widows weeping. By it, none wounded in feeling, none injured in interest. Even the dram-maker, and dram seller, will have glided into other occupations so gradually, as never to have felt the shock of change; and will stand ready to join all others in the universal song of gladness.
And what a noble ally this, to the cause of political freedom. With such an aid, its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition, the sorrow quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day, when, all appetites controled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conqueringmind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!
And when the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birth-place and the cradle of both those revolutions, that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly distinguished that People, who shall have planted, and nurtured to maturity, both the political and moral freedom of their species.
This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the birth-day of Washington. We are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name, an eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor, leave it shining on.

Application for Patent (March 10, 1849)

Ranking

#122 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

Annotated Transcript

On This Date

HD Daily Report, March 10, 1849

The Lincoln Log, March 10, 1849

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 10.57.11 AM
 View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“. . .Lincoln’s steamboat invention was utilitarian and not simply an exercise of his intellect or a self-aggrandizing means of fame and fortune (although if his model had been manufactured and he had realized some profit, he surely would not have complained or refused).  Growing up as a pioneer farmer and boatman, Lincoln knew the necessity for reliable transportation not just for travel but also to take farm products to market, and he hoped his invention would help facilitate river navigation.  It was the realization of Lincoln’s understanding of the needs of the western American as well as an outgrowth of his long-held political belief in internal improvements.  Lincoln had championed Henry Clay’s American System since his first term as a state legislator in 1834 and continued it into his presidential terms.”

Jason Emerson, Lincoln the Inventor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 13

“By [November 1860], the outlines of [Lincoln’s] biography had grown familiar.  But readers were surely surprised when the reigning bible of technology, Scientific American—otherwise devoting its latest issue to newly invented carriage wheels and gas meters—focused, too, on an eleven-year-old device for buoying vessels over river shoals.  Neither the blueprint, nor the four-foot wooden model he had first floated in a Springfield trough more than eleven years earlier, had matured to the development phase, and in truth seemed unlikely to work.  But the editors had learned that it had been invented ‘by no less a personage than the President elect of the United States.’  Abraham Lincoln’s 1849 patent (number 6469), though it had failed to attract investors, much less revolutionize river travel as once he had dreamed, now received the full Scientific American treatment, with the would-be inventor’s handmade wooden model exhaustively described and faithfully reproduced in woodcut.  The journal tactfully sidestepped the scientific merits of Lincoln’s idea, gently conceding that ‘we hope the author of it will have better success in presiding as Chief Magistrate over the people of the entire Union than he has had as an inventor.’  But the magazine was clearly impressed, suggesting that Lincoln’s little-known foray into science demonstrated ‘the variety of talents possessed by men’—one man in particular.  In face, no other president before or since has ever held a federal patent.  As the magazine pointed out, ‘it is probable that among our readers there are thousands of mechanics who would devise a better apparatus for buoying steamboats over [sand]bars, but how many of them would be able to compete successfully in the race for the Presidency?'”

Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 137

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

March 10, 1849
 
…To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, in the county of Sangamon, in the state of Illinois, have invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes; and I do hereby declare the following to be a full, clear, and exact description thereof, reference being had to the accompanying drawings making a part of this specification. Similar letters indicate like parts in all the figures.
The buoyant chambers A. A. which I employ, are constructed in such a manner that they can be expanded so as to hold a large volume of air when required for use, and can be contracted, into a very small space and safely secured as soon as their services can be dispensed with…
…I wish it to be distinctly understood, that I do not intend to limit myself to any particular mechanical arrangement, in combining expansible buoyant chambers with a vessel, but shall vary the same as I may deem expedient, whilst I attain the same end by substantially the same means. What I claim as my invention and desire to secure by letters patent, is the combination of expansible buoyant chambers placed at the sides of a vessel, with the main shaft or shafts C, by means of the sliding spars, or shafts D, which pass down through the buoyant chambers and are made fast to their bottoms, and the series of ropes and pullies, or their equivalents, in such a manner that by turning the main shaft or shafts in one direction, the buoyant chambers will be forced downwards into the water and at the same time expanded and filled with air for buoying up the vessel by the displacement of water; and by turning the shaft in an opposite direction, the buoyant chambers will be contracted into a small space and secured against injury.
Witness 
Z. C. ROBBINS 
A. LINCOLN
H. H. SYLVESTER

Letter to Jonathan Scammon (November 10, 1854)

Ranking

#123 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

Annotated Transcript

Some partial friends are for me for the U.S. Senate; and it would be very foolish, and very false, for me to deny that I would be pleased with an election to that Honorable body.  If you know nothing, and feel nothing to the contrary, please mark for me with the members.

On This Date

HD Daily Report, November 10, 1854

The Lincoln Log, November 10, 1854

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 11.14.05 AM
View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln, Herndon recalled, was ‘ambitious to reach the United States Senate, and, warmly encouraged in his aspirations by his wife,’ campaigned for the post with ‘his characteristic activity and vigilance.  During the anxious moments that intervened between the general election [in November] and the assembling of the Legislature [in January] he slept, like Napoleon, with one eye open.’  Three days after the November election, Lincoln began writing a torrent of letters asking support for his senate bid.  On November 10, he appealed to Charles Hoyt of Aurora: ‘You used to express a good deal of partiality for me; and if you are still so, now is the time.  Some friends here are really for me, for the U.S. Senate; and I should be very grateful if you could make a mark for me among your members.’  That same day, he told Jonathan Y. Scammon of Chicago that ‘Some partial friends here are for me for the U.S. Senate; and it would be very foolish, and very false, for me to deny that I would be pleased with an election to that Honorable body.  If you know nothing, and feel nothing to the contrary, please make a mark for me with the members.’  The following day he asked Jacob Harding of Paris to visit his legislator and “make a mark with him for me,’ for ‘I really have some chance.’  Later that month, he appealed to Thomas J. Henderson of Toulon: ‘It has come round that a whig may, by possibility, be elected to the U.S. Senate; and I want the chance of being the man.  You are a member of the Legislature, and have a vote to give.  Think it over, and see whether you can do better than to go for me.’  The following month, he wrote Joseph Gillespie: ‘I have really got it into my head to try to be United States Senator; and if I could have your support my chances would be reasonably good.'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (PDF), pp. 1123-1125

 

“Lincoln was dismissive of nativism at least in private, and most of his biographers have quoted a handful of his now famous letters to figures such as political activist Owen Lovejoy and old friend Joshua Speed in the mid-1850s that contained some moving denunciations of nativist prejudice.  Yet the new documents from the post-Collected Works period also illustrate how Boss Lincoln was also apparently able to compartmentalize his personal views whenever it came to the necessities of managing the party machinery.  Lincoln’s outreach to Know Nothings, Americans, and former Fillmore men was not only persistent but also at times subtle.  Consider this rarely cited 1854 note from the First Supplement (1974) to Chicago attorney and businessman Jonathan Y. Scammon. . . ‘If you know nothing, and feel nothing to the contrary.’  Such a confidential double entendre might have been a mere coincidence, but most likely it was a clever pun intended to create some ambiguity as to whether or not Lincoln was kidding around or trying to signal implicit sympathy with the Know Nothings.  Scammon cautiously declined to answer in writing, promising instead to ‘communicate personally.’  Scammon’s ties to the nativist movement, if any, remain murky, although all that really matters here is what Lincoln might have believed.”

Matthew Pinsker, “Boss Lincoln: A Reappraisal of Abraham Lincoln’s Party Leadership,” in The Living Lincoln, ed. by Thomas A. Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank J. Williams (Carbondale: Souther Illinois University Press, 2011), 25-26

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

November 10, 1854
 
J.Y.Scammon, Esq
My dear Sir:
Some partial friends are for me for the U.S. Senate; and it would be very foolish, and very false, for me to deny that I would be pleased with an election to that Honorable body.  If you know nothing, and feel nothing to the contrary, please mark for me with the members.  Write me, at all events.  Direct to Springfield.
Let this be confidential.
Yours as ever,
A. Lincoln

Letter to Ichabod Codding (November 27, 1854)

Ranking

#124 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Your note of the 13th. requesting my attendance of the Republican State Central Committee, on the 17th. Inst. at Chicago, was, owing to my absence from home, received on the evening of that day (17th) only. While I have pen in hand allow me to say I have been perplexed some to understand why my name was placed on that committee. I was not consulted on the subject; nor was I apprized of the appointment, until I discovered it by accident two or three weeks afterwards.” 

 

On This Date

HD Daily Report, November 27, 1854

The Lincoln Log, November 27, 1854

Custom Map

Screen shot 2014-01-26 at 11.16.25 AM
 View in Larger Map

How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln advised Whigs to ‘stand with anybody that stands RIGHT,’ even if it meant standing with the ‘abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise,’ suggesting that there were moments when principle must overcome party.  His words were put to a test almost immediately. . . The fusionists placed his name on the Republican State Central Committee, even though some of them expressed doubts about the sincerity of his views on slavery.  The Douglas press gleefully pounced on the action as proof that Lincoln was an abolitionist after all.  Deeply annoyed and perplexed, Lincoln protested that his name had been used without consulting him first.  ‘I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party, he explained to Ichabod Codding, ‘but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not at all satisfactory to that party.’  His response was equivocal; this time, political expediency overcame principle.  Still, he did not ask that his name be removed, and he only implied that he was unwilling to serve.  Perhaps the Republicans had misunderstood his position, he suggestion.  Or had he misunderstood theirs?  He was unwilling to commit himself to their cause, but he did not want to alienate them either.”

Robert W. Johannsen, Lincoln, The South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1993), 45-46

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Springfield,
Novr. 27. 1854
 
I. Codding, Esq
Dear Sir 
Your note of the 13th. requesting my attendance of the Republican State Central Committee, on the 17th. Inst. at Chicago, was, owing to my absence from home, received on the evening of that day (17th) only. While I have pen in hand allow me to say I have been perplexed some to understand why my name was placed on that committee. I was not consulted on the subject; nor was I apprized of the appointment, until I discovered it by accident two or three weeks afterwards. I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically; was not at all satisfactory to that party. The leading men who organized that party, were present, on the 4th. of Oct. at the discussion between Douglas and myself at Springfield, and had full oppertunity to not misunderstand my position. Do I misunderstand theirs? Please write, and inform me. 
Yours truly 
A. LINCOLN

Page 2 of 3

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén