John E. Roll

In 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald launched a series of recollected accounts about Abraham Lincoln which the editors claimed would introduce new elements to the Lincoln story.  These rare recollections have never since been republished as part of their own series, but modern scholars have used some of them to powerful effect.  However, this summer, student interns from the House Divided Project are busy scanning, transcribing and preparing this series for free distribution on the web.  Today, we are posting just one of these recollections, an account from John E. Roll, a carpenter who knew Lincoln from New Salem days and also claimed to have heard him say during the famous “House Divided” speech (June 16, 1858), that, “I used to be a slave.”  This last comment has taken on some real importance in modern years, employed in various books by some leading scholars, including Michael Burlingame and Allen Guelzo, and also, most recently, by journalist Sidney Blumenthal who is using that quotation to help open his projected four-volume biography of Lincoln.  The decision raises many interesting questions about historical method, but for now, we thought it would help teachers and students to see for themselves the full transcript of Roll’s original account here.  What follows below appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald on August 25, 1895 (transcribed by Trevor Diamond, Class of 2017):

John E. Roll

John E. Roll is celebrated, among other things, as having assisted Abraham Lincoln in the construction of the flat boat with which the tall Kentuckian made his first trip from Salem, Ill., to New Orleans, in 1831.

“I knew him when he was 22 years old,” said Mr. Roll. “He came down here to Sangamontown and worked in the timber building a flat boat for Orfutt & Greene, who were merchants and shippers. Sangamntown was then quite a place. There were two stores, a steam saw mill and a grist-mill, a tavern and a carding mill. I have seen fifty horses hitched there of a Saturday afternoon. Now there is not a stick to mark the place. The roads are cut out, so you can’t get to it without going across the fields.

They built the boat up there because there was better timber, and were going to take it down and load at Petersburg. Charles Broadwell had a sawmill at Sangamontown, and Lincoln was there bossing the job. I came along and wanted work, and he hired me, and I made the pins for the boat. We launched here there, and she got a good deal of water in herm and we got her down as far as Salem dam, and there she was stuck, with her bow over the dam. And Lincoln bored a hole in the bottom of the boat, and let the water out. Looks like a funny way to get water out of a boat, to bore a hole in the bottom, but if the bottom is sticking out in the air, it is all right, I guess.

Lincoln was an awful clumsy looking man at that time. He wore a homespun suit of clothes, and a big pair of cowhide boots, with his trousers strapped down under them, as was the custom of that day, to keep them from crawling up his legs. And his coat was a roundabout, and when he stooped over his work we could see about four inches of his suspenders. He had on an old slouch wool hat. He was getting $15 a month from Offutt & Greene at that time.

After we got the flatboat launched we went out in the timber and found a good tree, and made a canoe. John Seaman and Walter Carman were along and they wanted to have the first ride in the canoe, and they jumped in, and the water was very high and swift and they tipped over and were in danger of drowning. The whole bottom was overflowed and there was a big elm tree standing about 100 feet from the shore, with its branches in the water, and Lincoln called to them to swim to the tree, and hold on there till we could get them. So they caught the branches, and got up in the tree. It was in March and the water was very cold. So we got a log and tied a rope to it and James Doyle got on the log and tried to get to them but the log turned over with him and he had to get in the tree with the other two.

Then we pulled the log ashore and Lincoln got straddle of it, and the rest of us paid out the rope and let him down toward the tree, and he got to them and took them off and brought them ashore.

After that he went on and loaded his boat with corn at Petersburg, and went down the river to New Orleans. I don’t know how he got back but I have an idea he walked back though he may have come back by steamboat. He worked a while for Offutt & Greene in their store at Salem, and then he bought it out, and afterward he sold it and came here to Springfield and wen to practicing law.

All the time he was running the store he had been studying law. He would walk up here to Springfield, twenty miles, and borrow books from Major Stuart and read them, and bring them back. He didn’t seem to be much of a speaker, but it seemed he could do whatever he started to do.

I had come up here to Springfield as soon as I got through the job on the flatboat and was working at the plastering trade when he moved up here. One time I remember I saw him out here on the Salem road walking along and reading one book, with another under his arm. He got tired and sat down on a log to rest. And while he rested he went on reading.

I put my money in land as fast as I made it and was worth a good deal of money. Lincoln and I were always good friends. One time Tom Lewis and I were standing and talking on the street and Tom said: ‘John, why don’t you run for some office? You’ve got so many tenants you could make them elect you.’ And I said I didn’t want no office till Abe Lincoln was elected President of the United States, and then I would expect him to give me an office because I had worked with him on the flat boat. And Lincoln came along just then—it was long before he had ever been mentioned for President, and Tom told him what I had said. And Lincoln laughed and said when hot to be President he would give me an office.

So I was the first man he ever promised an office to, but I never got it. Oh, yes I was making more money then than any office was worth. I wouldn’t have had any office. I didn’t want any.

I remember one time in a speech he made at the courthouse, that time he said the country could not live half slave and half free, he said we were all slaves one time or another, but that white men could make themselves free and the negroes could not. He said: “There is my old friend John Roll. He used to be a slave, but he made himself free, and I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice law.’  I remember that.”

Editor’s Note:  There has been an avalanche of important new scholarship on the Underground Railroad over the last twenty years, and yet there remains a critical gap in the literature.  Scholars know comparatively little about the slave catchers (or kidnappers) who chased after the fugitives (or freedom seekers).  This is a challenge that Maryland historian Milt Diggins has tackled in an important new biography of Thomas McCreary, who spearheaded slave-catching operations along the Mason-Dixon Line during the antebellum period.  Teachers and students should know more about such men and their methods and so we asked Diggins to share a post at Blog Divided that would help highlight the main insights of his book, which can be purchased from the Maryland Historical Society or at other online retailers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. 

Guest post by Milt Diggins

In 2007, while serving as volunteer editor for the Historical Society of Cecil County in Elkton, I came across a nineteenth century newspaper article that caught my attention. Fredrick Douglass referred to “Thomas McCreary, the notorious kidnapper from Elkton.” No one at the historical society had ever heard of McCreary, and apparently neither did anyone else in the county. Ask people to name a slave catcher and kidnapper and many could name Patty Cannon. The story of the infamous Cannon-Johnson gang is encrusted with local myth, but remove the layers of folklore and history will still reveal a formidable gang of kidnappers with a deserved reputation for viciousness. But why did Douglass call McCreary a notorious kidnapper? That question, and the questions that followed, drove seven years of research and writing. Patty Cannon may be better known, but reconstructing the story of the once notorious but nearly forgotten Thomas McCreary reveals him to be a more significant figure for examining the controversy over slave catching and kidnapping.

One reason for McCreary’s historical importance was the time period in which he gained notoriety. Cannon died in prison in 1829. The debate in Congress over the abolition of slavery heated up in the 1830s. The Prigg vs Pennsylvania decision in 1842 proclaimed the constitutional right of slave catchers to capture suspected fugitives without hindrance by state governments, a guiding principle for slave catchers and kidnappers like McCreary. Northern states attempted to provide some protection for citizens of color through personal liberty laws, like Pennsylvania’s, revised and enacted in 1847. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased federal responsibility for recovering escaped slaves by authorizing US circuit court commissioners to try fugitive cases. The most violent reaction to that law occurred at Christiana, Pennsylvania, one decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. McCreary operated within this series of events, and his actions were shaped by them. His activities added fuel to the animosity between Maryland and Pennsylvania over the slavery issue and the distinction between slave catching and kidnapping.

McCreary benefitted from the support of his community, adding a second dimension missing in the story of the Cannon-Johnson gang. Proslavery advocates prized his forays into Pennsylvania and his prowess for capturing accused runaway slaves. Local newspapers praised McCreary as Elkton’s hometown hero. The editors defended his “arrests” to counter criticism from Pennsylvanians, and from Delawareans, most notably Thomas Garrett, and the editors of the Blue Hens Chicken, an antislavery newspaper.

McCreary’s relationship with the political elite is a third reason for his significance. McCreary was deeply in debt when the county declared him insolvent in December, 1838. Two months later, the governor appointed him to a state position in Elkton, an indication that McCreary had found favor with Cecil County’s political bosses. In time that local political connection would extend to the state level. These political relationships would work to McCreary’s advantage.

Patty Cannon’s villainy was widely recognized. Opinions divided over McCreary, mirroring the growing national divide. Elevated to the status of state hero, McCreary represented Maryland’s insistence on the unrestricted right of slave catchers to seize blacks in Northern states and force them into the hands of slaveholders. Whereas opponents criticized McCreary’s questionable slave catching tactics and condemned him for obvious kidnappings, proslavery Marylanders valued McCreary as an effective slave catcher. In their view, it was politically impossible for him to be a kidnapper, no matter what the likes of abolitionists like Fredrick Douglass or Thomas Garrett said, or what a Pennsylvania jury might have said if given the chance.

Digital Scholarship Lab.  University of Richmond, 2014.  http://dsl.richmond.edu/projects/

Reviewed by Leah Miller, Dickinson College

DSL Projects gateway

The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond uses technology to digitize and present historical data in a way that reveals hidden patterns.  The lab consists of eight main projects which present various insights into American history:

• Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States
• Virginia Secession Convention
• Hidden Patterns of the Civil War
• Mining the Dispatch
• Visualizing Emancipation
• History Engine
• Redlining Richmond
• Voting America

While the data covered by these projects spans all of American history from Columbus to the present, particular focus is devoted to the nineteenth century.  Rather than presenting the large-scale, political history which is available in the average classroom textbook, these projects analyze the movements and actions of the common person.  The result is a series of new stories about the experience of the average American—white, black, male, female—who worked, migrated, fought, and suffered for their freedom.

The most recent project is the digitized Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, originally drawn up in 1932 by U.S. naval historian Charles O. Paullin and geographer John K. Wright.  The print edition of the atlas—which includes over 700 maps on 166 plates that cover American history from 1492 to 1930—has greatly impacted many historical publications even to the present day.  Recently for the New York Times, project director Robert K. Nelson explained that “Paullin’s maps show ordinary people making a living, moving across the landscape, worshipping at churches, voting in elections.”  This new, digital edition changes the way we can interpret these maps.  Each map has been georeferenced and georectified to provide accurate and optimal web-viewing, but the viewer can switch to a high-quality scan of the original plates.  The user can also toggle a sidebar with Paullin’s original text and legends, as well as zoom in and out and adjust the transparency of the map overlay.  Permalinks save all these preferences and ensure they can be accessed in the future.  Series of maps that show progression of movement or activity through time have been animated.  For example, the animation of slave populations from 1790-1860 shows the concentration of southern slave power and its expansion westward concurrently with gradual emancipation of slaves in the North.  Furthermore, the statistical annotations provided for this map declare the exact numbers and percentages of slaves in each county, and by 1820 provide a breakdown of the slaves’ genders.  Some maps are accompanied by additional analytical blog posts.  “Vanishing Indians,” by lab director Robert K. Nelson, discusses the atlas’ shortcomings when it comes to portraying Native Americans in their relationships to each other.

The Visualizing Emancipation project is another interactive map which highlights slavery’s end during the Civil War.  The map “presents a history of emancipation where brutality is sometimes easier to see than generosity and where the costs of war and freedom fell disproportionately on the most vulnerable in the South.”  Users can filter through different types of emancipation events (i.e. African Americans helping the Union, their captures by either army, fugitive slave-related incidents, etc.), as well as different types of sources, including books, newspapers, official records, or personal papers.  Like the Atlas, this map is animated, so as the user toggles pins and filters on and off, she can follow the relationship between emancipation and the position of the Union army, or the agency of slaves in obtaining their own freedom.  The project also features certain events and figures as starting points for understanding emancipation, with the ability to pinpoint each event on the map.  I only wish that there were at least one featured example where a person or group were involved in multiple events, so a user could follow their physical journey using the map.  For those teaching emancipation, there is an accompanying lesson plan and worksheet.  Students are encouraged to contribute by submitting information they find in primary source documents, since the map, which covers “only a small slice of the available evidence documenting the end of slavery,” could never be complete.

Voting America also makes use of animated maps to show changes and differences in voting preferences for presidential and congressional elections (1840–2008).  The key factor is scope, which illuminates different patterns and trends.  For example, changing popular votes at the state level show which parties won each election, while at the county level show how each state was politically divided.  The dot-density maps are even more democratic, as 1 dot=500 votes in an area; this way, more third-party votes are recorded.  For these types of maps, every legend shows important political events in history; so, one can watch the progression of voter turnout since 1840 and note the effect the Fifteenth and Twentieth Amendments had.  The user also has the option to view individual elections in each of these capacities.  Population maps show the location and movements of black Americans (represented—a bit stereotypically—as black dots) and white Americans (represented by pink dots).  Unfortunately there is no option to view these populations together, nor is there any representation of immigrant populations.  The project is accompanied by an interactive map which can be used to compare presidential election years, but my computer, running Adobe flash player version 12.0.0.38, was unable to open it.  An alternative version is available through Google Maps, but currently this feature is down.  Finally, a “Scholars Corner” provides expert analysis by DSL staff on certain voting trends.

Three other projects in the lab focus on the American Civil War.  Mining the Dispatch uses topic-modeling, a computerized method of pulling together multiple documents that have the same key words within them.  This can reveal interesting categories and patterns among texts.  In this case, Nelson ran every issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from November 1860 to Lincoln’s death in April 1865.  Some of the more interesting topics are fugitive slave ads, anti-northern diatribes, military recruitment versus conscription, humor etc.  Nelson juxtaposed line graphs showing the frequency of similar topics, and, tentatively, relationships emerged.  This project is still in its preliminary phase and because of its algorithmic collection process, the data is imperfect.  Still, it is a good jumping off point for research questions.

The Virginia Secession Convention project seems to diverge from the site’s aim to tell the average American’s story.  It seeks to explain the decision of the VA delegates to secede from the Union through their full-text searchable speeches and the Convention’s proceedings.  However, as the Data Visualizations page shows, their decisions were likely influenced by their constituents.  Each county is annotated with statistics about the constituents: percentages of slaveholders and the enslaved, average farm value per acre, and pro- or anti-Union stances.

Finally, though Hidden Patterns of the Civil War largely highlights many of the projects already discussed, it also includes other mini-projects and tools, like a collection of maps that shows the migration patterns of black Virginians who married after the war, a Google Earth tour of the Richmond slave market developed from a sketch by painter Eyre Crowe, and a full-access digital database of the Richmond Daily Dispatch during the Civil War.

While the two remaining projects are less relevant to the nineteenth century, they are great tools for the classroom.  Redlining Richmond maps and annotates the racist categorizations of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a New Deal agency) in the late ’30s.  The assigned value of each neighborhood is based on race and nationality, and shows the lingering effects of slavery in the Jim Crow era.  The History Engine is a “moderated wiki” where students generate three-paragraph “episodes” (rather than arguments) about people, places, or events in American history, drawing on local university or online archives and secondary sources.  Because registration is required, each submission is carefully screened for quality and accuracy.  The project’s aim is to place students from around the world in conversation with each other and their work.

The eight projects of the Digital Scholarship Lab thoughtfully and extensively explore the individual experiences of Americans during the nineteenth century.  The Lab’s innovative use of technology illuminates otherwise obscure patterns of growth, contest, suffering, and change.  This is an invaluable resource for studying the social history of our nation, and a must for anyone teaching or learning about the American Civil War.

This photo of a newly discovered Lincoln letter (provided by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project) provoked scholars to wonder why there is a section mysteriously clipped out

Last Friday, the Associated Press reported on the discovery of a previously unknown Abraham Lincoln document, and with it, a puzzling mystery.  Addressed only to “My dear Sir,” a portion of the letter had been carefully removed, eliminating the key to understanding its meaning.  Lincoln appears to have been writing “in haste” to someone asking if he or she could “keep up a correspondence” with an unknown person.  “I like to know his views occasionally,” Lincoln wrote.  Researchers at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project focused on the peculiar phrase, “keep up a correspondence,” and ran it through their database, matching it to a letter written to Lincoln by fellow Republican Leonard Swett in June 1860.  In his note, Swett mentioned that he would “try to keep up a correspondence during the Campaign” with “our friend T W of Albany.”  Researchers believe these initials refers to Thurlow Weed, the powerful editor of the Albany Evening Journal, a leading Republican newspaper from New York.  During that period, Weed was essentially serving as a campaign manager for New York senator William Henry Seward, whom Lincoln had just defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860.  Candidate Lincoln needed full backing from Seward, Weed and their various supporters in the upcoming election but worried that he might not receive it because they were so disappointed over Seward’s unexpected defeat.  This would explain why Lincoln and Swett wanted to keep close tabs on Weed and his views and why Lincoln may have sent the mysterious letter featured above.

New letters and documents relating to Abraham Lincoln turn up more frequently than you might realize.  Just a few weeks ago for Time magazine, House Divided Project director Matthew Pinsker highlighted some recent discoveries that give us powerful new insights into Lincoln.  In 2008, scholars revealed that Lincoln had once fired off an angry letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune which belittled another Republican politician as “Sister Burlingame” and which Pinsker calls “the angriest, nastiest written statement Lincoln ever produced.”   Another newly discovered letter from 1859 reveals that Lincoln privately called slavery  the only “living issue of the day” and wrote that it would be “idiotic” to think otherwise.  Pinsker also points out that even something as monumental as the transcript for Lincoln’s very first national speech (1847) has only just recently been made available to scholars.

For teachers and students using our Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition site, we’ve added a new tool to help you examine some of the best of these recent documents for yourself.  Under the “Special Topics” heading, which can be found in the right-hand sidebar of every page, there is a link to  “recently discovered documents.” As you browse each of these documents, you can also use the tags at the bottom of each page to find other related materials.

In your quest for new Lincoln materials, however, always keep in mind that there are sometimes Lincoln forgeries in circulation, especially over the Internet.  This problem has even fooled us before.  Just remember that the most reputable sources for Lincoln documents remain the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln  and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.  And, of course, we’ll do our best to help navigate the truth as well.

To honor Lincoln’s 205th birthday, we are tweeting out the top ten Lincoln resources from House Divided.  But here is the full list:

#1    Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition

Created by participants in the “Understanding Lincoln” open online graduate course (offered in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History), this site (still in development) features 150 of Lincoln’s “most teachable” documents and offers a full array of multi-media resources designed to help teach them in the K-12 and undergraduate classroom.  This site is especially useful for Common Core alignments.

#2   Building the Digital Lincoln (Journal of American History)

Created as part of the Lincoln Bicentennial anniversary, this site offers a snapshot of where the “Digital Lincoln” stood as of 2009, and includes a host of examples of research and presentation tools, especially designed for serious student and academic scholars.

#3   Emancipation Digital Classroom

Created in part to help transform insights from James Oakes’s prize-winning study, Freedom National (2013) into use for the modern-day classroom, this site presents an array of primary and secondary source tools for studying the complicated but fascinating subject of emancipation and abolition.

#4  Unofficial Teacher’s Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln

This “unofficial” guide includes access to Tony Kushner’s script, a full cast of characters (with photo comparisons to actual historical figures), and extensive analysis of the artistic license in the film and the historical reaction to Steven Spielberg’s important movie project.

#5  Lincoln-Douglas Debates Digital Classroom

This site offers a clickable word cloud of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and host of other rare primary sources for use in studying these critical texts.

#6  Abraham Lincoln in the House Divided Research Engine

The House Divided Research Engine is a Drupal-based content management system that contains over 12,000 public domain images and tens of thousands of documents and other historical records.  The link above takes users directly to Abraham Lincoln’s main record page and offers a well-curated gateway for Lincoln research.

#7  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses (Google Cultural Institute)

This short but compelling exhibit came together as part of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and helps visitors understand the evolution of the document, including a sharp analysis of all five manuscript versions of the address in Lincoln’s handwriting.

#8  Lincoln’s Autobiographical Sketch (YouTube & RapGenius)

Dickinson College students Leah Miller and Will Nelligan helped create short but engaging tools for studying Lincoln’s most important autobiographical writing –a sketch he produced in late 1859 to help launch his presidential bid.  There is a six minute YouTube video of the sketch and an annotated edition of it through the new platform at RapGenius.

#9  Burlingame’s Lincoln Biography (Teaching Edition)

Michael Burlingame’s prize-winning Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008) is the most important new multi-volume study of Lincoln, but it is difficult to teach because it is so lengthy.  With permission, however, from both the author and the publisher (Johns Hopkins University Press), we have created short visually enhanced excerpts from the work that focus on the election of 1860 and include clickable footnotes, allowing teachers and students to “see” Burlingame’s sources directly.

#10  Mash Up of Collected Works, Lincoln Day-By-Day, and Lincoln Papers

Created by technologist Rafael Alvarado, this mash up includes an integrated interface allowing users to see the online edition of Lincoln’s Collected Works (his known writings), Lincoln Day-By-Day (his daily schedule), and The Abraham Lincoln Papers At the Library of Congress (the bulk of his extant correspondence) for the essential “one-stop” shopping experience.  There is nothing else quite like this “timemap” available on the Internet –a must-see for serious and aspiring scholars.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute recently published a new essay by House Divided co-director Matthew Pinsker in their December 2010 issue of History Now. As Pinsker explains in “The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War”:

“The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.”

You can read the full essay here. Other essays in this issue include “Lincoln’s Interpretation of the Civil War” by Eric Foner, “The Riddles of ‘Confederate Emancipation’” by Bruce Levine, and “Women and the Home Front: New Civil War Scholarship” by Catherine Clinton. All of the past issues of History Now are available here.

The Civil War Letters of the Christie Family at the Minnesota Historical Society offer an interesting perspective from three brothers who served in the Union army. Thomas and William Christie, who were both born in Ireland, enlisted in the First Minnesota Battery in 1861 and participated in the Vicksburg campaign as well as General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Thomas had no difficulty in adjusting to “military life,” but noted that other soldiers in his regiment apparently found the transition to be a difficult one. “A great many of our men — and the Americans especially — cannot leave off those habits of Independence, which are so meritorious in the civilian, but so pernicious in the Soldier,” as Thomas observed. While they described their experiences during the war in detail, they also commented on contemporary political issues. William identified slavery as the cause of the conflict and supported President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “For lighting the torch of Freedom,” William wrote that “the oppressed thoughout the land are this day Praying God to give us the victory.” Alexander, however, did not enlist until late 1864. After several months of training, his infantry regiment arrived in North Carolina in early April 1865 to participate in what he considered “the last great forward advancement of Sherman’s Army.”

In December 2010 the Minnesota Historical Society published a collection of these  letters — Hampton Smith, Brother of Mine: The Civil War Letters of Thomas and William Christie (2010). “The letters are so engaging that one longs for more,”as a review in the Minneapolis – St. Paul Star Tribune notes. You can read the full review here.

Newspapers across the country published President Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address in March 1861, but not all included the correct version. Editors in New Orleans had, as the Chicago (IL) Tribune explained, “horribly botched” the speech. Not only had “words [been] altered,” but sentences [were] cut in two in the middle and other sentences [were] run together.” As a result, Lincoln’s speech had been turned “into a ridiculous jumble and mass of nonsense.” While Tribune editor Joseph Medill knew from experience that “a long document [rarely] is transmitted over the wires without undergoing more or less transformation,” he believed in this case that New Orleans editors deliberately included errors in order to further their disunion agenda. “Evidently the conductors of the secession press are unwilling that the people whom they have hurried into rebellion without a cause, shall have the opportunity of learning the truth or of listening to exhortations of loyalty,” as Medill concluded. The only “parallel instance of meanness” that Medill could recall had occurred during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. As the Tribune noted in September 1858, Democratic editors told their reporters “to report [Lincoln’s speeches] incorrectly, to leave out words and sentences, and otherwise to mutilate his arguments so as to destroy their force and effect on the minds of those who read the Douglas papers.” You can read more about the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Michael Burlingame’s “Mucilating Douglas and Mutilating Lincoln: How Shorthand Reporters Covered the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858,” Lincoln Herald (1994) and Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008). As for President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, see chapter 3 of Douglas L. Wilson’s Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006).

“American History TV” on C-SPAN 3 featured an episode inside the classroom of House Divided Project co-director Matthew Pinsker. C-SPAN cameras followed Pinsker as he led a discussion about Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 for a class at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. During the session, Pinsker premiered a documentary short film recently created for Journal Divided. “Honest Abe” is one of six videos created to support new interactive essays based on excerpts from the unedited manuscript of Michael Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008). Other essays include “Writing Lincoln’s Lives,” “Railsplitter,” and “Make No Contracts.”

You can watch the full 75-minute episode on C-SPAN’s website.

While Abraham Lincoln was elected “by one of the largest voter turnouts in United States history,” historian Phillip Shaw Paludan notes that “the Republican victory was entirely sectional.” Lincoln and Hannibal Hamblin did not receive any votes from the Deep South states. Yet divisions also existed within northern states, including Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. The election results for Carlisle reflected a deep divide in the community – while Republicans won the town (overall votes in Carlisle West Ward / East Ward), Democrats received the most votes overall in Carlisle District (For more details, see election return tables below). As for Cumberland County, Lincoln received 51.5% of the vote in Cumberland County. These results largely correspond with historians’ arguments about urban and rural voting patterns in the 1860 election. While “one might expect to find northern cities to have been stronghold of Republicanism,” David Potter argues that “Lincoln received much less support in the urban North than he did in the rural North.” Republicans received the most votes by far in the rural precincts of Cumberland County and came very close to losing Carlisle. One can see which precinct Lincoln’s party won in the map below — precincts that Republicans won have blank backgrounds. This map was originally published in John Wesley Weigel’s “Free Soil: The Birth of the Republican Party in Cumberland County,” Cumberland County History Journal (Summer 2000). The full article, along with other essays that explore the political history of the Whigs and Democrats in Cumberland County, are available on this post as PDF files.

(Click on the map to see larger version)

In addition, you can click the “Continue Reading” link below to see the detailed election returns for Cumberland County, Carlisle District, and Newville District below –
continue reading "Election of 1860 – Cumberland County"