{"id":1,"date":"2018-08-23T12:46:54","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T12:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/?p=1"},"modified":"2023-08-05T18:12:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T18:12:17","slug":"lincoln-boasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/lincoln-boasts\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln Boasts of “Slave Stampedes”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lincoln\"On Friday evening, January 9, 1863, Abraham Lincoln held a private meeting at the White House with two key Republican senators \u2013John P. Hale<\/a> of New Hampshire and Orville H. Browning<\/a> of Illinois\u2014where he boasted proudly about the reaction of Missouri’s enslaved population to his recently issued Emancipation Proclamation.\u00a0 While pointing at a map of the western borderland area, featuring Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, the president claimed that since the first public announcement of emancipation (September 22, 1862), \u201cthe negroes were stampeding in Missouri,\u201d creating a backlash among Democrats in that region.\u00a0 Lincoln wanted to use this moment to press for a compensated abolition measure in Missouri, describing this Western slave state,\u00a0according to the revealing but little-known entry in Browning\u2019s diary, as \u201can empire of herself,\u201d claiming it would be more than \u201cenough\u201d for the legacy of each of these three men, \u201cif we make\u00a0<\/span>Missouri free.\u201d<\/span>[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Lincoln\u2019s use of the concept of the <\/span>slave stampede<\/strong> was surely no accident.\u00a0 He had personal experience with that term, because he had seen it bandied about in<\/span><\/p>\n

\"newspaper

Illinois State Journal, January 22, 1850<\/p><\/div>\n

Springfield\u00a0<\/span>newspapers about a dozen years earlier, when his neighbor, <\/span>Jameson Jenkins<\/a>, a free black drayman, was accused of orchestrating a \u201cslave stampede\u201d from Missouri during the early weeks of 1850. Modern scholarship on the Underground Railroad and emancipation has not done enough to emphasize the impact of this concept of the \u201cslave stampede\u201d on the mindset of politicians like Lincoln.\u00a0 Nor has there been quite enough attention to the importance of mass escapes within the overall process of seeking freedom in antebellum America.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Diary entry, January 9, 1863 in Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning <\/em>(2 vols., Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1: 611-12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday evening, January 9, 1863, Abraham Lincoln held a private meeting at the White House with two key Republican senators \u2013John P. Hale of New Hampshire and Orville H. Browning of Illinois\u2014where he boasted proudly about the reaction of Missouri’s enslaved population to his recently issued Emancipation Proclamation.\u00a0 While pointing at a map of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-primary-sources","tag-primary-sources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2275,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/2275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}