Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln to Robert Moseley, 2 July 18581
Springfield, July 2. 1858Robert Mosely Esq[Esquire]My dear Sir:
Your letter of the 29^th is received, and for which I thank you– Herewith I send a little article which I wish you would have published in the "Prarie Beacon" next week. Besides my own recollection, I have carefully examined the Journals since I saw you; and I know the editor will be entirely safe in publishing the article– Get it into the first paper.2
Yours very truly A. Lincoln–

1Abraham Lincoln wrote and signed this letter.

2Both Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, and the editors searched the Prairie Beacon, without success, for the article that Lincoln notes he enclosed with this letter. Some of the context for this letter is therefore missing. Robert Moseley’s June 29 letter to Lincoln focused on Democratic insinuations that the Republican Party was composed of radical abolitionists bent on emancipation by "stealing" and subsequently freeing enslaved persons, and that Lincoln, as the Republican candidate for Stephen A. Douglas’ seat in the U.S. Senate, supported the same. It is possible that the article Lincoln wished Moseley to publish was related to these insinuations.
In local elections for the Illinois General Assembly, which elected U.S. senators in 1858, Edgar County’s voters sent Moseley to the Illinois House of Representatives and Thomas A. Marshall, another Republican, to the Illinois Senate. Democrats retained a majority in both chambers, however, allowing Douglas to win reelection to the U.S. Senate in the 1858 Federal Election. Through the campaign, however, and in particular through his participation in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln gained national recognition as well as standing within the Republican Party.
Robert Moseley to Abraham Lincoln; The Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 17 November 1858, 2:4; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:483; Allen C. Guelzo, “House Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 394, 416-17; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:556-57.