CW, 2:316–317
In 1846, Lincoln won election as a Whig to the U.S. House of Representatives but served only one term. As he readied himself for a return to electoral politics eight years later, he found his party disintegrating. Despite their differing positions on slavery, the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy sought to bring Lincoln into the fledgling Republican Party. Lincoln proved reluctant to abandon the party of his revered mentor Henry Clay, wary of joining a party containing a strong antislavery faction. Lovejoy had long roots in abolitionist politics that culminated in four consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1856. In 1840—three years after a proslavery mob murdered his brother Elijah, the editor of an antislavery newspaper—Lovejoy had co-founded the abolitionist Liberty Party, the first political party to run African Americans as political candidates. Though it never gained traction, the Liberty Party represented one influential precedent to the new organization that Lovejoy helped create out of the diverse political elements that opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. A divided political landscape became further complicated by the rise of nativist parties like the anti-immigration Know Nothings. A large number of Whigs, themselves leery of foreigners, had defected to the Know Nothings after the Whig Party tried to recruit immigrants away from the Democratic Party. In early 1856, with the dissolution of the Whig Party all but complete, Lincoln led a group of Anti-Nebraska editors in drafting a declaration announcing the intentions of the Republican Party in the coming presidential election. It contained compromises that would allow a “fusion” party to form, incorporating the divergent platforms of antislavery advocates, immigrants, and Know Nothings. On May 29, 1856, Lincoln publicly broke with the Whigs and joined the Illinois Republican Party. For Lincoln’s slow progress toward the Republicans, see: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Hon. Owen Lovejoy: |
Springfield, |
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. . . .
Yours truly
A. Lincoln—