Anatomy
Groups
Index

This Week in
American History

August 22 — 28, 1856

Lincoln Campaigns for the Republican Party's First Presidential Bid

During the summer and fall of 1856, Abraham Lincoln travelled extensively, campaigning for the election of John C. Fremont as President, on the newly-formed Republican Party ticket. On August 27, Lincoln delivered an address at Kalamazoo, Michigan which summed up the reasons for defeating the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, who had no objection to the spread of slavery into the national territories.

The question of slavery in the territories was an old one, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had forbidden slavery in the states which would be formed out of the Northwest Territory, which was located north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had forbidden slavery in the Louisiana Territory, which had been acquired from Spain, but the Southern states continued to lobby for slavery's expansion west.

A crisis was reached in 1849, when California applied for admission as a free state. To preserve the union, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster put together a series of bills, known as the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state and abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia. But the compromise also granted concessions to the South: Utah and New Mexico could enter the Union as either free or slave states; the Federal government assumed the debt incurred by Texas during its brief nationhood; and a new and harsher fugitive slave law was passed.

Although the Fugitive Slave Law was abhorred by many, the compromise held for four years, until Democratic U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced and rammed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and President Franklin Pierce signed it. This act invalidated the Missouri Compromise by providing that the territory from which the states of Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming were later formed, was to be organized into two large sections called Kansas and Nebraska. The issue of slavery in these two sections was to be determined not by Congress, but by the people who would settle there. This method of spreading slavery was labelled "popular sovereignty" by Senator Douglas.

Abraham Lincoln, who had been active mostly behind the scenes as a Whig Party strategist, and had served as a Whig National Committeeman for Illinois during the 1852 Presidential campaign, now determined to challenge Douglas and his ideology at every point. When Douglas came back to Illinois to defend his actions, Lincoln answered his speeches with those of his own, usually on the same day or evening. At Peoria, Illinois on October 16, 1854, Lincoln stated that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was "wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it."

"This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal, for the spread of slavery," said Lincoln, "I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest."

Although many Americans were appalled by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they were scattered among a multitude of parties. Lincoln himself was a Whig, a proponent of the American System of Political Economy and a supporter of Henry Clay. But Clay died in 1852, at a time when the Whig Party was already beginning to decline. During the severe economic recession of 1854-1855, a number of nativist parties had sprung up, fearful of competition from recent immigrants. These were grouped together under the name of "Know-Nothings." In addition, there were the Abolitionists, and also Democrats who, despite their party's endorsement of the legislation, opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Lincoln knew it was important to unite all these factions against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, no matter how much they might differ on other issues. There were many attempts during 1854 and the following years to put together "fusion" parties, but the real success came with the formation of the Republican Party. Lincoln played an interesting role in this process, and he took a different route than others with the same goal in mind.

In January of 1856, a call went out to the editors of what were now called "Anti-Nebraska" newspapers, to meet and plan for the next presidential election. The meeting took place at Decatur, Illinois on February 22, and Abraham Lincoln was the only non-journalist in attendance. Using Lincoln's advice, the newspapermen drafted a declaration that called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and pledged non-interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. The declaration also affirmed the "free soil" doctrine that stated that the United States was founded on the principle that freedom was national, and that slavery was exceptional.

Full article on separate page...