Summary of Remarks to a Serenade at Springfield, Illinois, 25 September 18581
Mr. Lincoln returned to this city on Saturday night.2 His numerous friends will be glad to learn that he is in excellent health and spirits.
The Republican Club, learning of his arrival, determined to serenade him, which they did immediately
after the adjournment of their meeting. The Club were accompanied to his residence
by their band, and a large concourse of citizens. After the band had played a few
lively airs in front of his house, Mr. Lincoln appeared on the portico and thanked
his friends for this renewed manifestation of their regard for the principles he defends,
and after assuring them, wherever he has been the skies are bright and the prospects
good for the triumph of those principles which are dear to us all, he excused himself
and retired amid deafening cheers.3
2Abraham Lincoln spoke on Friday evening, September 24, at the Evart House in Urbana, Illinois. He spent about twenty minutes of his speech on his argument, made in his famous
“House-Divided Speech” on June 16, 1858, that a house divided against itself cannot
stand.
Lincoln was running against incumbent senator Stephen A. Douglas to represent Illinois in 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 Douglas both focused their campaign efforts
on the former Whig stronghold of central Illinois, where the state legislative races were the closest.
See 1858 Illinois Republican Convention; 1858 Federal Election.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 24 September 1858, https://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1858-09-24; 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; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape
of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 392-94, 400-401; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:457-58, 476-77.
3Lincoln spent the next day, Sunday, in Springfield and left again for Jacksonville on Monday, where he spoke to a crowd estimated at fifteen thousand.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 27 September 1858, https://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1858-09-27; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 29 September 1858, 3:1.
Printed Document, 1 page(s), Daily Illinois State Journal , (Springfield, IL) , 27 September 1858, 2:1.