CW, 3:522–550
In early 1860, following a string of successful speeches in the Midwest, Lincoln quietly initiated his campaign for president. Before he could openly challenge a party leader like William H. Seward, Lincoln began building momentum and expanding his influence. In December 1859, he published a brief autobiography. Then, in February 1860, he enthusiastically accepted an invitation to lecture at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, a center of abolitionism. He purchased a new black suit (one hundred dollars at the local tailors, Woods & Heckle) and carefully researched and prepared what would become the speech of his career. However, upon arriving in New York, Lincoln learned that sponsorship of the event had been assumed by the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, whose members included the not-so-young poet William Cullen Bryant and the graybeard abolitionist Horace Greeley, men intent on denying Seward the presidential nomination. They also moved the event from Brooklyn to the Cooper Union in Manhattan, the famed tuition-free school for adult education where conservative antislavery men Frank Blair from Missouri and Cassius Clay from Kentucky already had spoken. The speech proved a smashing success and appeared in the New York Tribune, the Chicago Press and Tribune, the Detroit Tribune, the Albany Evening Journal, and as a separate pamphlet. Lincoln had been well known in Republican circles, but national attention had focused largely on Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates as the party’s possible presidential nominees. After the Cooper Institute address, Lincoln emerged as one of Seward’s main rivals. The speech avoided the usual harsh racial commentary and focused entirely on the challenge posed by the South to the Union. The nationalist appeal proved effective and memorable. For the circumstances of Lincoln’s famous address, see: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
National Republican Chart / Presidential Campaign, 1860, broadside, New York, 1860. A colorized, wood-engraving by H. H. Lloyd. The chart features images of Lincoln and his running mate Hannibal Hamlin, quotes from Lincoln, the Republican Party platform, and information about previous presidents.
Dividing the National Map. Cincinnati (?), 1860. A lithograph showing the presidential candidates, Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and John Breckinridge, tearing the nation apart, while John Bell of the Constitution-Union Party tries to repair it. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-10493.
Stephen Finding His Mother. Drawn by Louis Maurer (?), 1860, lithograph by Currier & Ives, criticizing Stephen A. Douglas, who explained a campaign swing through New England and New York as a trip to see his mother. The national image of Columbia is spanking Douglas with a switch symbolizing temperance (Douglas was often accused of overindulging in alcohol) while a Founding Father image urges Columbia to “lay it on.” Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-14832.
. . . A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery.” But we do let them alone—have never disturbed them—so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.
I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free-State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis, than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.
Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man—such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
RACE AND THE 1860 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
The Undecided Political Prize Fight, Cincinnati (?), 1860, boosts the candidacy of John C. Breckinridge of the southern wing of the Democratic Party by depicting Douglas as the candidate of the Irish and Lincoln as the stand-in for African Americans. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-7877.
The Political Quadrille. Music by Dred Scott, Cincinnati (?), 1860, places African Americans at the center of the presidential contest, with each candidate dancing to the tune played by the Supreme Court in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. Following the charge repeated tirelessly by Senator Douglas, Lincoln is shown as the advocate of miscegenation. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-14827.
Lincoln and Douglas in a presidential footrace, a lithograph by J. Sage & Sons, Buffalo, New York, 1860. Image depicts a hurdle placed on the road to the White House by Abraham Lincoln that Stephen A. Douglas could not surmount. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-14834.
“The Nigger” in the Woodpile, lithograph, drawn by Louis Maurer (?), 1860, published by Currier & Ives, New York, promotes Democratic charges that abolitionists controlled the Republican Party, and that Lincoln’s rise to party leadership rested upon antislavery support. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-8898.
An Heir to the Throne, or the Next Republican Candidate, lithograph drawn by Louis Maurer (?), 1860, published by Currier & Ives, New York. The image casts a black microcephalic who had appeared in P. T. Barnum’s Broadway Museum as the next Republican candidate for president. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-1997.