John Trible to Abraham Lincoln, 20 July 18581
Alton, July 20th 1858.Hon Abraham LincolnSpringfield, Ill.Dr[Dear] sirI have read Mr Douglas speech at Chicago and Springfield. From these two speeches I think his future course in the ensuing campaign is sufficiently developed to show that he intends to put you upon your defense, in
order to withdraw attention from his own circuitous and slimy course.2 No man in America has pursued a more inconsistent course at one time in favor of
the Wilmot Proviso, then opposed it.3 At one time in favor of the Missouri Compromise & then repealed it;4 at one time in favor of the people regulating the subject of slavery in the territories
while under a
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territorial government, and then he endorses the Dred Scott decision5Though I am but slightly acquainted, the interest I feel in your success and in the
success you of the principles you advocate lead me to suggest whether you had not better attack
his course instead of being compelled as now mainly on the defensive.6
Yrs[Yours] RespectfullyJohn Trible7<Page 3>
[Envelope]
A[LT]ON Ill.[Illinois]
JUL[JULY] 21Hon Abraham LincolnSpringfield,Illinois.
JUL[JULY] 21Hon Abraham LincolnSpringfield,Illinois.
2Abraham Lincoln had recently been nominated at the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention to run against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Douglas had commenced his reelection campaign with a speech in Chicago on July 9,
1858, which he repeated in Springfield on July 17. In these speeches, Douglas attacked
Lincoln on two aspects of the latter’s June 16, 1858 speech in Springfield, the so-called
“House Divided” speech. Douglas first challenged Lincoln’s assertion that the United
States could not continue to exist as half-slave and half-free, and argued that Lincoln
was calling for uniformity in state laws and institutions and advocating sectional
war between free and slave states. Douglas also took issue with Lincoln’s criticism
of the decision in Scott v. Sandford. See the 1858 Federal Election
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:457-58, 467-74; Robert W.
Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 22-36; 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.
3As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Douglas voted to table the Wilmot Proviso to amend President James K. Polk’s August 8, 1846 request for funds to negotiate peace with Mexico. He further voted against the engrossment of the amended appropriation bill and against
its final passage. When Douglas resumed his attempt to establish a territorial government
for Oregon in the next session of the U.S. Congress, his previously uncontroversial provision to prohibit slavery in Oregon was caught
up in the continuing debate over the Wilmot Proviso. Southern legislators did not
want Douglas to justify the prohibition of slavery in Oregon based on the language
of the Northwest Ordinance as he initially did, as this language was similarly used in the Wilmot Proviso, which
they also opposed. Instead, southern legislators desired him to ground Oregon’s potential
status as a free territory on an extension of the Missouri Compromise, using the argument
that Oregon was located north of the 36° 30’ north latitude stipulated by that measure
as the dividing line for future slave and free states. An amendment to this effect
failed, but Douglas pledged to support an extension of the Missouri Compromise line
in place of the Wilmot Proviso’s prohibition of slavery in all land acquired from
Mexico, and his Oregon bill ultimately passed. When the Wilmot Proviso came up for
debate again in February 1847, Douglas proposed an ultimately unsuccessful amendment
to establish an extension of the Missouri Compromise line as the basis for the Proviso’s
limitations on slavery. Throughout debate on the Wilmot Proviso, Douglas opposed it
as originally drafted.
Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 200-205.
4As chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Territories, Douglas oversaw the proposal
and passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which proposed the creation of the Kansas and Nebraska territories and established popular sovereignty as the method by which the slave
status of these territories would be determined. The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively
superceded the Missouri Compromise by ignoring the latter’s stipulation that any new
states north of 36° 30’ north latitude should enter the union as free states.
Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 402, 405-34.
5The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sandford found in part that American citizens had the right to transport their property, including
enslaved peoples, wherever they chose within the United States regardless of the desire
of residents of individual states or territories to prohibit slavery. Lincoln queried
Douglas on the contradiction of his support of the decision in Scott v. Sandford and his promotion of the concept of popular sovereignty during the second Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Freeport on August 27, 1858, in what would become a major point of contention in the 1858 U.S. Senate race in Illinois.
Walter Ehrlich, “Dred Scott Case,” Dictionary of American History, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 2:370; Joseph Medill to Abraham Lincoln; Second Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois; Second Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois; Second Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois; Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850’s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 121-42.
6Several other correspondents wrote to Lincoln during the campaign of 1858 to encourage
him to attack Douglas offensively in his speeches, rather than speak defensively.
John Mathers to Abraham Lincoln; Johnson H. Jordan to Abraham Lincoln; Leander Munsell to Abraham Lincoln; David Davis to Abraham Lincoln.
Autograph Letter Signed, 3 page(s), Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (Washington, DC).