Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Summary of Speech at Bloomington, Illinois, 29 May 18561

Abraham Lincoln, of Sangamon, came upon the platform amid deafening applause. He enumerated the pressing reasons of the present movement. He was here ready to fuse with any one who would unite with him to oppose slave power; spoke of the bugbear disunion which was so vaguely threatened. It was to be remembered that the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts. It must be “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”2 The sentiment in favor of white slavery now prevailed in all the slave state papers, except those of Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri and Maryland.3 Such was the progress of the National Democracy. Douglas once claimed against him that Democracy favored more than his principles, the individual rights of man. Was it not strange that he must stand there now to defend those rights against their former eulogist?4 The Black Democracy were endeavoring to cite Henry Clay to reconcile old Whigs to their doctrine, and repaid them with the very cheap compliment of National Whigs.5

1This summary, which appeared in the AltonWeekly Courier, is the only contemporary account of the Abraham Lincoln’s so-called “Lost Speech” delivered at the 1856 Illinois Anti-Nebraska Convention. A text of Lincoln’s remarks in his hand is not extant. In 1896, Henry C. Whitney reconstructed Lincoln’s speech from his notes, and he published this lengthy reconstruction in McClure’s Magazine in September 1896. Some collections of Lincoln’s writings and speeches include Whitney’s version, but Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, did not include it, dismissing it as “not...worthy of serious consideration.” The editors have followed Basler in only including the summary from the Alton Weekly Courier.
On May 24, 1856, a Springfield convention, attended by citizens “who are opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and who are opposed to the present administration,” elected Lincoln as a delegate to the Illinois Anti-Nebraska Convention to be held May 29 in Bloomington. Lincoln started for the convention on May 27 and arrived the next day to make an impromptu speech that evening. The day of the convention, May 29, Lincoln made this speech at the end of the event.

Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:341; H. C. Whitney, “Lincoln’s Lost Speech,” McClure’s Magazine 7 (September 1896), 319-31; Elwell Crissey, Lincoln’s Lost Speech: The Pivot of his Career (New York: Hawthorn, 1967); Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 26 May 1856, 2:2; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 27 May 1856, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1856-05-27; 28 May 1856, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1856-05-28; The Alton Weekly Courier (IL), 5 June 1856, 1:8-9.

2Daniel Webster uttered this quote on January 27, 1830, in his second reply to Robert Y. Hayne during a debate in the U.S. Senate over protective tariffs. See the Nullification Crisis.
Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and his Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 328; 6 Cong. Deb. 80 (1830).

3The term “white slavery” refers to the “subordination of free labor to slave labor.”
Ian Iverson, “Conservative to the Last Degree: The Emerging Illinois Republican Party and the Election of 1856,” MA Thesis (University of Virginia, 2019), 28.

4Lincoln employed the phase “the individual rights of man” in his defense of the Declaration of Independence against Stephen A. Douglas’ views on Bleeding Kansas and the Dred Scott Decision in a speech in Springfield, Illinois on June 26, 1857.

5The Black Democracy was a term sometimes used for pro-slavery Democrats.
National Whigs was a short-lived attempt to revive the Whig Party after the 1854 Federal Elections. The movement originated in New York, where the Silver Grays, conservatives opposed to William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, held a convention in January 1855 to re-constitute the Whig Party based on opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, support for Compromise Measures of 1850, and opposition to fusing with other groups to form a sectional party.

At the conclusion of Lincoln’s speech, “the audience sprang to their feet, and cheer after cheer told how deeply their hearts had been touched, and their souls warmed up to a generous enthusiasm.” The Illinois State Journal described it: “For an hour and a half he [Lincoln] held the assemblage spell-bound by the power of his argument, the intense irony of his invective and the deep earnestness and fervid brilliancy of his eloquence.”
Hinton Rowan Helper, Compendium of the Impending Crisis of the South (New York: A. B. Burdick: 1860), 82; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 903-4; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 3 June 1856, 2:1.