Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Summary of Speech at Beardstown, Illinois, 12 August 18581

At 2 P.M. Mr. Lincoln was escorted to the stand by the Rushville Band, and received there with music of the Arenzville Band. He was then welcomed in a very eloquent speech by Judge Rich, of that place, and as he came forward and bowed to the audience, he was received with a perfect storm of applause.2

We could by no manner of means do justice to the masterly effort he put forth. It is sufficient to say that he took up the ridiculous charges of his opponent and completely annihilated them.

He very plainly showed his reasons for making the charge that Senator Douglas knew from the first that the effect of his Kansas bill would be to spread slavery over our Territories, and insisted that it would be far more honorable for him to disprove his statements, than to meet it with “infamous lie!”3

He showed that Douglas had no foundation for charging him with being favorable to negro equality; it was a false logic that assumed because a man did not want a negro woman for a slave, he must needs want her for a wife.4 From copious statistics he showed that where slavery existed, the white race was mixed with the black, to an alarming degree, and thus proved that his policy of keeping them separate was decidedly more to be approved than that of Judge Douglas’, who would bring them in contact. But we need say no more. Mr. Lincoln was warmly and frequently applauded. He took the broad ground that Douglas persistently misrepresented his views in this canvass, neither would he retract when convicted of his criminality.5

1This summary appeared in the August 18 edition of the Schuyler Citizen. A fuller report of the speech appeared in the August 19 edition of the Daily Illinois State Journal.
Schuyler Citizen (Rushville, IL), 18 August 1858, 2:2-3; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 19 August 1858, 2:2.

2Francis Arenz also welcomed Abraham Lincoln to Beardstown. Lincoln was the Republican candidate from Illinois for the U.S. Senate. At this time the Illinois General Assembly elected the state’s representatives in the U.S. Senate, thus the outcome of races for the Illinois House of Representatives and Illinois Senate were of importance to Lincoln’s campaign. Lincoln campaigned extensively in Illinois in the summer and fall of 1858, delivering speeches and campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates for the General Assembly. He and his opponent, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, the incumbent, both focused their campaign efforts on the former Whig stronghold of central Illinois, where the state legislative races were the closest. In local elections, Republicans gained a majority of the votes, but Pro-Douglas Democrats retained control of the General Assembly, and Douglas won re-election. See 1858 Illinois Republican Convention; 1858 Federal Election.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:458-61; 476-77, 513-14, 546-47; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 392-99, 400-401, 414-16.

3In his “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, Lincoln had charged Douglas with working to nationalize slavery. In a speech at Beardstown on August 11, Douglas denied this charge, calling it, according to the crowd at Lincoln ‘s Beardstown speech, “an infamous lie.” In his Beardstown speech, Lincoln focused on renewing his charge against Douglas of conspiring to nationalize slavery. He emphasized Douglas’s refusal to deny the evidence Lincoln presented and insisted that he would continue to charge Douglas with conspiracy. Lincoln’s evidence included Douglas helping to vote down a clause in the early version of the Kansas-Nebraska bill that would have given the people of the territories the right to exclude slavery if they chose. Lincoln also cited Douglas’s Senate report of March 12, 1856, in which he proposed denying territories the right to exclude slavery until they became a state.
Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Fragment of A House Divided: Speech at Springfield, Illinois; U.S. Senate Journal. 1856. 34th Cong., 1st sess., Rep. com., no. 34, 39; U.S. Senate Journal. 1856. 34th Cong., 1st sess., 408-9.

4In his July 9 speech in Chicago, Douglas accused Lincoln of fomenting a sectional war to achieve political and social equality between whites and blacks. Douglas disavowed racial equality, declaring, “this government was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men... I am opposed to negro equality.” This ran in opposition to Lincoln, according to Douglas, who wanted to afford “the negro of the privileges, immunities and rights of citizenship.” Douglas then detailed the rights that only white men should hold, including the right to vote, hold office, or serve on a jury. In his response to Douglas in Chicago on July 10, Lincoln denied Douglas’s charge, arguing “against that counterfeit logic which presumes I because I did not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 468; Chicago Daily Press and Tribune (IL), 10 July 1858, 1:4; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois.

5In 1865, Chicago Press and Tribune reporter Horace White claimed that Lincoln’s comments regarding the Declaration of Independence in his August 17 speech at Lewistown were actually a part of Lincoln’s Beardstown speech. However, none of the contemporary reports of the Beardstown speech reference Lincoln bringing up the topic of the Declaration of Independence.
William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center and the University of Illinois Press, 2006), 254; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:544, 547.