Report of Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, 11 September 18581
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DEMOCRATIC AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTIES.
“I have been requested,” said Mr. Lincoln, “to give a concise statement, as I understand it, of the difference between the Democratic
and the Republican parties on the leading issues of this campaign.2 The question has just been put to me by a gentleman whom I do not know.3 I do not even know whether he is a friend of mine or a supporter of Judge Douglas in this contest; nor does that make any difference. His question is a pertinent one, and, though
it has not been asked me anywhere in the State before, I am very glad that my attention has been called to it to-day. Lest I should forget it, I will give you my answer before proceeding with the line
of argument I had marked out for this discussion.[”]
“The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties on the leading issue
of this contest, as I understand it, is, that the former consider slavery a moral,
social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong; and the action of each, as
respects the growth of the country and the expansion of our population, is squared
to meet these views. I will not allege that the Democratic party consider slavery
morally, socially and politically right; though their tendency to that view has, in my opinion, been constant and unmistakable
for the past five years. I prefer to take, as the accepted maxim of the party, the idea put forth by Judge Douglas, that he ‘don’t care whether slavery is voted
down or voted up.’4 I am quite willing to believe that many Democrats would prefer that slavery be always
voted down, and I am sure that some prefer that it be always ‘voted up;’ but I have
a right to insist that their action, especially if it be their constant and unvarying action, shall determine their ideas and preferences on the subject. Every measure
of the Democratic party of late years, bearing directly or indirectly on the slavery
question, has corresponded with this notion of utter indifference whether slavery
or freedom shall outrun in the race of empire across the Pacific—every measure, I say, up to the Dred Scott decision, where, it seems to me, the idea is boldly suggested that slavery is better than freedom.5 The Republican party, on the contrary, hold that this government was instituted to
secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil to the negro,
to the white man, to the soil, and to the State. Regarding it an evil, they will
not molest it in the States where it exists; they will not overlook the constitutional
guards which our forefathers have placed around it; they will do nothing which can
give proper offence to those who hold slaves by legal sanction; but they will use every constitutional
method to prevent the evil from becoming larger and involving more negroes, more white
men, more soil, and more States in its deplorable consequences. They will, if possible,
place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of
ultimate peaceable extinction, in God’s own good time. And to this end they will,
if possible, restore the government to the policy of the fathers—the policy of preserving
the new territories from the baneful influence of human bondage, as the Northwestern
territories were sought to be preserved by the ordinance of 1787 and the compromise act of 1820.6 They will oppose, in all its length and breadth, the modern Democratic idea that
slavery is as good as freedom, and ought to have room for expansion all over the continent,
if people can be found to carry it. All, or very nearly all, of Judge Douglas’ arguments
about ‘Popular Sovereignty,’ as he calls it, are logical if you admit that slavery
is as good and as right as freedom; and not one of them is worth a rush if you deny
it. This is the difference, as I understand it, between the Republican and the Democratic
parties; and I ask the gentleman, and all of you, whether his question is not satisfactorily
answered.— [”](Cries of 'Yes, yes.'”)
OPINIONS OF HENRY CLAY.
"In this connection let me read for you the opinions of our old leader Henry Clay,
on the question of whether slavery is as good as freedom. The extract which I propose to read is contained [in] a letter written by Mr. Clay in his old age, as late as 1849. The circumstances
which called it forth were these. A convention had been called to form a new constitution
for the State of Kentucky.7 The old Constitution had been adopted in the year 1799—half a century before, when
Mr. Clay was a young man just rising into public notice. As long ago as the adoption
of the old Constitution, Mr. Clay had been the earnest advocate of a system of gradual
emancipation and colonization of the stars of Kentucky.8 And again in his old age, in the maturity of his great mind, we find the same wise
project still uppermost in his thoughts. Let me read a few passages from his letter
of 1849: 'I know there are those who draw an argument in favor of slavery from the
alleged intellectual inferiority of the black race. Whether this argument is founded
in fact or not, I will not now stop to inquire, but merely say that if it proves anything
at all, it proves too much. It proves that among the white races of the world any
one might properly be enslaved by any other which had made greater advances in civilization.
And, if this rule applies to nations, there is no reason why it should not apply to
individuals; and it might easily be proved that the wisest man in the world could
rightfully reduce all other men and women to bondage”9 &c[etc]., &c. (Mr. Lincoln read at considerable length from Mr. Clay’s letter—earnestly pressing
the material advantages and moral considerations in favor of gradual emancipation
in Kentucky.)10
“POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY,” WHAT DID DOUGLAS REALLY INVENT?
“Let us inquire, what Douglas really invented, when he introduced, and drove through
Congress, the Nebraska bill. He called it “Populr Sovereignty.” What does Popular Sovereignty mean? Strictly and literally it means
the sovereignty of the people over their own affairs—in other words, the right of
the people of every nation and community to govern themselves. Did Mr. Douglas invent
this? Not quite. The idea of Popular Sovereignty was floating about the world several
ages before the author of the Nebraska bill saw daylight—indeed before Columbus set foot on the American continent. In the year 1776 it took tangible form in the
noble words which you are all familiar with: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal; That they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalenable rights; That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; That to
secure these rights governments were instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’11 Was not this the origin of Popular Sovereignty as applied to the American people?
Here we are told that Governments are instituted among men to secure certain rights,
and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If that is not Popular Sovereignty, then I have no conception of the meaning of
words.[”]
“Then, if Mr. Douglas did not invent this kind of sovereignty, let us pursue the inquiry and find out what the invention really
was. Was it the right of emigrants in Kansas and Nebraska to govern themselves and a gang of niggers too, if they wanted them? Clearly this
was no invention of his, because Gen. Cass put forth the same doctrine in 1848, in his so-called Nicholson letter—six whole years before Douglas thought of such a thing.12 Gen. Cass could have taken out a patent for the idea, if he had chosen to do so,
and have prevented his Illinois rival from reaping a particle of benefit from it. Then what was it, I ask again, that
this 'Little Giant' invented? It never occurred to Gen. Cass to call his discovery by the odd name of
'Popular Sovereignty.' He had not the impudence to say that the right of people to govern niggers was the right of people to govern themselves. His notions of the fitness of things were not moulded to the brazen degree of calling the right to put a hundred niggers through under
the lash in Nebraska, a 'sacred right of self-government.' And here, I submit to this intelligent audience and the whole world, was Judge
Douglas’ discovery, and the whole of it. He invented a name for Gen. Cass’ old Nicholson letter dogma. He discovered that the right of the white
man to breed and flog niggers in Nebraska was POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY!—[”] (Great applause and laughter.)
WHAT MAY WE LOOK FOR AFTER THE NEXT DRED SCOTT DECISION?
“My friends, I have endeavored to show you the logical consequences of the Dred Scott
decision, which holds that the people of a Territory cannot prevent the establishment
of Slavery in their midst. I have stated what cannot be gainsayed—that the grounds
upon which this decision is made are equally applicable to the Free States as to the
Free Territories, and that the peculiar reasons put forth by Judge Douglas for endorsing
this decision, commit him in advance to the next decision, and to all other decisions
emanating from the same source.13 Now, when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negroes; when
you have put him down, and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts
of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of
hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned;
are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our
frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the
strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against
a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties,
without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit
which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy
this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize
yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear
them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the
genius of our own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant
who rises. And let me tell you, all these things are prepared for you with the logic
of history, if the election shall promise that the next Dred Scott decision and all future decisions will be
quietly acquiesced in by the people.—” (Loud applause.)14
1Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech in Edwardsville, Illinois, on September 11, 1858.
The Alton Weekly Courier published this report of his speech in its September 16, 1858 edition.
At the time, Lincoln was running in the 1858 Federal Election against Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas as the Illinois Republican Party’s
candidate for election to the U.S. Senate. Both he and Douglas traveled the state throughout the fall and summer of 1858, delivering
public speeches in support of candidates for the Illinois General Assembly in their respective parties and participating in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. They were highly attuned to the local elections for members of the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois Senate because, at the time, members of the General Assembly voted for and elected the state’s
representatives in the U.S. Senate. See the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention.
The Alton Weekly Courier (IL), 16 September 1858, 2:8-9; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:458; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses
Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 392, 394.
4This is a quote from a speech Douglas delivered in the U.S. Senate on December 9,
1857. In the speech, which addressed the controversy surrounding the admission of the Kansas Territory into the Union as a state, Douglas
stated, “If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it; if she
wants a free-State constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which
way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.”
Lincoln referenced Douglas not caring about slavery being voted down or voted up in
multiple speeches during the 1858 campaign as well as during the first Lincoln-Douglas
Debate.
Cong. Globe, Thirty-Fifth Cong., 1st Sess., 18 (1857); Fragment of Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Fragment of Notes for Debates; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois; Report of Speech at Chicago, Illinois; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois.
5Lincoln is referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Scott v. Sandford. In the majority opinion for the case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that African Americans were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be
reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 407 (1857).
6Lincoln references antislavery arguments common at the time: that the nation’s founders
were either explicitly or implicitly antislavery, believed and intended the institution
of slavery to die out over time, and that both they and subsequent political leaders
codified these perspectives into the nation’s founding documents and legislation related
to federal territories. Abolitionists used these arguments, as did Lincoln and other
antislavery members of the Republican Party as they fought the expansion of slavery.
James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021), xii-xviii; Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 20, 24-26.
7On January 10, 1847, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill for a state constitutional convention. The convention assembled in
Frankfort, Kentucky, on October 1, 1849.
Gertrude Pettus, “The Issues in the Kentucky Constitutional Convention 1849-1850”
(MA thesis, University of Louisville, 1941), 3; The Louisville Daily Journal (KY), 2 October 1849, 3:3.
8Throughout his political career, Henry Clay advocated for the gradual emancipation
of enslaved people in the United States and for their removal and relocation, once
freed, to Africa. He and other members of organizations such as the American Colonization Society believed at the time that the colonization of free African Americans represented
the most practical way to handle the nation’s many deep-seated problems with race
and racism.
Kenneth E. Aubens, “The Influence of Henry Clay Upon Abraham Lincoln Regarding Lines
of Argument on the Slavery Issue” (MA thesis, Eastern Illinois University, 1974),
19-25.
9This does not appear to be a direct quotation of a letter written by Clay. In content
and structure, it very closely matches a paragraph in a letter Clay wrote to Richard
Pindell on February 17, 1849. In that letter, which was widely circulated in newspapers
in 1849, per Clay’s wishes, Clay wrote: “An argument in support of reducing the African
race to slavery is sometimes derived from their alleged intellectual inferiority to
the white races, but, if this argument be founded in fact (as it may be, but which
I shall not now examine,) it would prove entirely too much. It would prove that any
white nation which had made greater advances in civilization, knowledge and wisdom
than another white nation, would have a right to reduce the latter to a state of bondage.
Nay, further: if the principle of subjugation founded upon intellectual superiority
be true and be applicable to races and to nations, what is to prevent its being applied
to individuals? And then the wisest man in the world would have a right to make slaves
of all the rest of mankind!”
Some newspapers that printed the letter in 1849 took liberties with editing some of
its text. It is possible that Lincoln read from one of these edited reprints of Clay’s
letter rather than a fully faithful rendition of Clay’s original letter. It is also
possible that The Alton Weekly Courier garbled or paraphrased the quotation Lincoln read during his speech at Edwardsville,
or that the Courier accurately recorded what Lincoln read, but Lincoln read from some other published
version of Clay’s correspondence available at that time that was not a verbatim, accurate
account of Clay’s exact words to Pindell.
Melba Porter Hay, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 10:574-75; Lexington Observer and Reporter (KY), 7 March 1849, 1:2; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin (LA), 13 March 1849, 1:6; The Liberator (Boston, MA), 16 March 1849, 2:3; The Charleston Mercury (SC), 20 March 1849, 2:4; The Green Mountain Freeman (Montpelier, VT), 22 March 1849, 2:1.
10Despite Clay’s best efforts to get Kentucky to adopt a policy of gradual emancipation,
the state’s new constitution, adopted in 1850, reinforced protections for enslavement
under its Bill of Rights.
Both Lincoln and Douglas seized upon the name and memory Clay throughout the campaign
of 1858. Lincoln called Clay “my beau ideal of a statesman” and quoted the latter’s
views on slavery during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Douglas, meanwhile, tried to
link Clay to the doctrine of popular sovereignty as a way to convince former members
of the Whig Party that he and Clay shared a common interest in keeping slavery out of national politics.
Ky. Const. of 1850, art. XIII, § 3; Gertrude Pettus, “The Issues in the Kentucky Constitutional
Convention 1849-1850,” 31; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois; First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:493; Stephen Hansen and Paul Nygard, “Stephen A. Douglas, the Know-Nothings, and
the Democratic Party in Illinois, 1854-1858,” Illinois Historical Journal 87 (Summer 1994), 123.
11This is a quotation from the Declaration of Independence, although in the Declaration
the word “unalienable” is used rather than “inalienable” and present tense is utilized
throughout rather than past tense (i.e. “governments are instituted among men” rather
than “governments were instituted among men”).
Julian P. Boyd et al, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:429.
12General Lewis Cass wrote a letter to Alfred O. P. Nicholson on December 24, 1847.
In the letter, Cass offered one of the first articulations of popular sovereignty
as a solution to the problem of slavery in the U.S. territories. The letter was widely
published, and Cass ran for president during the 1848 Federal Election using the concept of popular sovereignty as his platform. Lincoln previously referenced
the letter in a speech he gave July 27, 1848 while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. He also referred to the letter during a speech he gave in Paris, Illinois on September 7, 1858.
Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis & Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964), 145; Niles’ National Register (Baltimore, MD), 8 January 1848, 293:2-3, 294:1-3; The Daily Union (Washington, DC), 30 December 1847, 2:5-6, 3:1.
13Throughout the 1858 campaign—including the Lincoln-Douglas Debates—Lincoln warned
voters that if Douglas were not defeated and the slave power not overthrown, another
Supreme Court ruling could build upon the Dred Scott decision and proclaim that the
U.S. Constitution prohibited states from excluding slavery within their own borders.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:459-61, 492-540; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Fragment of A House Divided Speech at Springfield, Illinois; Report of Speech at Springfield, Illinois; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 206-9.
14In the local elections of 1858, Republicans won a majority of all votes cast in Illinois,
but pro-Douglas Democrats retained control of the Illinois General Assembly and Douglas
ultimately won reelection. 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.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:556-57; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political
Landscape of 1858,” 414.
Copy of Printed Document, 1 page(s), Alton Weekly Courier , (Alton, IL) , 16 September 1858, 2:8-9. .