Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Barbour Lewis to Abraham Lincoln, 25 August 18581
Jacksonville, Illinois
Aug. 25. 1858.Dear Sir
Three things have thus far staggered the Douglas men and in this region they are reeling under them still. Your conspiracy charge, (keep it going, for it is true as God's own word,)2 Trumbull's charge in regard to popular sovereignty and the Toombs bill,3 and now the fact, (if true,) that he has passed a forgery upon the Ottawa meeting in regard to the Springfield Convention of 1854.4 These things well worked up and thoroughly brought before the people will give us 10000 votes which otherwise are sure for Douglas. I beg that for the sake of the cause you will

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put all the fire and spirit and vehement energy into these charges you can and brand them upon Douglas till like the shirt of Nessus5 they him as a politician, dead. Now in regard to that resolution if he was guilty of the infamous falsehood charged, it is your duty to expose him thoroughly. He has shown you no mercy and treated you with no honor or decency. All delicacy and tenderness towards him who has called you a liar and has basely slandered all your party, is unjust to your friends and to yourself. Hold him to a severe reckoning.6 If he has lied about the Springfield Convention, get the affidavits of a dozen or twenty of the best men who attended that convention

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and prove the true facts. We are getting to day the Affidavits of all who attended the Convention from this County. Mercy to Douglas is treachery to the cause of Right and Humanity. Cant you and our Central Committee get some competent man to prepare a document on Douglas which shall unmask and expose to the people all his political villainies for the last four or more years? Such a thing moderate in language, but awful in its facts, commencing with his intense love for the Missouri Compromise and showing him up as the murderer of the same,7 noting his old malice and hate of Henry Clay and exposing his late attempts to wheedle his followers now he is dead, and even to dig up his bones as it were to manure

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his own political cornfield,8 with all his other treacheries dodges and falsities, if made into a telling document and scattered broadcast will tell fearfully against him.9 Can you tell us yet when you will come here? People ask every day. Cant you let us know the time very soon. We intend if possible to have Lovejoy with us on the same occasion or some other and take him to Beardstown and Winchester. Please let us know about this as soon as you conveniently can. If you see Lovejoy use your influence with him to bring him along.10 You are gaining here much, especially within the last 10 or 15 days all over our County. Dug is losing ground here. At least 100 open Democrats are certain to vote against him in Morgan, and the number of the openly rebellious is still increasing. I write this after consulting with Mr Yates ^& other friends^ and by request. You may remember meeting me at the last court at Beardstown court.11
Yours truly–B. Lewis

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[Envelope]

JACKSONVILLE [ILL?]
AUG[AUGUST] 28 1858Hon. Abraham LincolnSpringfieldIllinois

[ docketing ]
Lincoln, Abraham (President)

Not now
B. Lewis–12

1Barbour Lewis wrote and signed this letter. He also wrote Abraham Lincoln’s name and address on the envelope shown in the fifth image.

2Lincoln was the Illinois Republican Party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in the 1858 Federal Election. He was running against Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas. Both men canvassed the state throughout the summer and fall of 1858, delivering speeches in support of candidates for the Illinois General Assembly in their respective parties. Members of the General Assembly voted for and elected the state’s representatives in the U.S. Senate at the time; therefore the outcome of the races for the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois Senate were critical to the race for the Senate seat.
Lincoln first made the “conspiracy charge” Lewis references during his so-called “House Divided” speech, which he delivered upon his acceptance of the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination of him as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, but he also repeated the charge during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. He accused Douglas of being part of a plot or conspiracy to nationalize slavery--a conspiracy he blamed on Northern Democrats. He argued that the plot began with Douglas’s involvement in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, then was advanced by both the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case and by President James Buchanan’s call to support the court’s decision. Lincoln warned his audiences that, if Douglas were not defeated and the pro-slavery conspiracy vanquished, 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 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:458-60, 492-540; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 392-94; 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.

3Lyman Trumbull aided the Republican Party and Lincoln during the campaign of 1858 by also canvassing the state on behalf of the party. One charge he made while canvassing was that Douglas made a critical change to the Toombs bill—a bill that Robert A. Toombs introduced in the U.S. Senate in June 1856 that was aimed at quelling the escalating political violence in Kansas by providing a pathway for a state constitutional convention in the Kansas Territory. The Senate had referred the measure to the Committee on Territories, which Douglas chaired at the time. When the committee reported on the bill, it no longer included a provision for the residents of Kansas to vote on any proposed constitution. Trumbull asserted that Douglas had made this change and was therefore hypocritical in his claims to support popular sovereignty. Trumbull made this charge his first speech of the campaign in Chicago on August 7, 1858.
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, 219-20; Ralph J. Roske, His Own Counsel: The Life and Times of Lyman Trumbull (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1979),38, 48; Chicago Daily Press and Tribune (IL), 9 August 1858, 1:2-7; Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., 15 (1857).

4Lewis is referring to some of Douglas’s remarks during the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate, which was held in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21. During the debate, Douglas read resolutions from what he claimed was the Republican Party’s first convention in Illinois. He claimed Lincoln helped draft the resolutions and that they constituted proof that Lincoln was a radical abolitionist. In reality, the resolutions he read aloud were from an 1854 Illinois Anti-Nebraska convention that was held in Aurora, Illinois, in October 1854 and Lincoln was neither involved in their drafting nor did he attend the convention. The convention was organized by and composed of delegates who were much more radical in their politics with regard to slavery than anti-slavery moderates such as Lincoln. Nevertheless, the convention’s delegates elected Lincoln, in absentia, to a twelve-member state central committee—something Douglas and other Democrats seized upon as further proof of Lincoln’s radical abolitionism.
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, 1:388, 490; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, 216.

5The shirt of Nessus is a reference to an ancient Greek tale about the death of Hercules. In the story, when the centaur Nessus conducted himself improperly toward Dejanira, Hercules’s wife, Hercules slew Nessus with an arrow poisoned with the blood of the Hydra. In revenge, as he lay dying, Nessus convinced Dejanira to keep his bloody shirt, telling her that if her husband’s affections for her ever diminished Hercules need only don the shirt and his affections to Dejanira would be restored. When Hercules later turned his amorous attention toward Iole and Dejanira learned of this, she sent the shirt of Nessus for Hercules to wear. When Hercules donned the shirt, the poison burned his flesh to such an extent that he threw himself on a funeral pyre to escape the agony.
Over time, “shirt of Nessus” became shorthand for any kind of inescapable misfortune.
Edward Baldwin, The Pantheon: Or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1806), 288-90; E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1872), 611.

6Lincoln did not catch Douglas’s misrepresentation of the radical Aurora platform for the more moderate Springfield platform during the Ottawa debate and therefore did not correct Douglas at the time, aside from noting that he had not helped create the platform that Douglas read aloud. During later debates, however, he confronted Douglas on the issue. Douglas eventually claimed that his mistake was an honest one, even though he made the same misrepresentation in an 1856 speech in the U.S. Senate (which Trumbull took him to task for at the time). Douglas elided personal responsibility for these false claims through the fall of 1858.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:490, 492, 503, 507, 513, 531-33.

7This is a reference to Douglas’s role in the passage and promotion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

8During each of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates Douglas invoked the name and memory of Henry Clay as one of the creators of the Compromise of 1850. The votes of former members of the Whig Party in central and southern Illinois were critical to the election, and Douglas hoped to link Clay to the doctrine of popular sovereignty as a way to convince former Whigs that he and Clay shared a common interest in keeping slavery out of national politics.
Lincoln greatly admired Clay, whom he referred to during the debates as “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.” He quoted Clay’s thoughts on slavery during the debates, emphasizing his agreement with Clay’s view of it as “a great evil” and an unfortunate inheritance from the nation’s forefathers that its citizens must contend with as best they could. He also accused Douglas of representing that class of men whom Clay referred to as determined to “repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation” by snuffing out “the moral lights around us.”
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; 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, 538.

9No evidence was found that either Lincoln or the Illinois Republican State Central Committee created and circulated a document or pamphlet summarizing Douglas’s political views or inconsistencies.
After the 1858 federal election, however, Lincoln personally compiled reports of his and Douglas’s speeches during the debates in a scrapbook. They were eventually published in 1860 in book form, and the book, Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois, quickly became a bestseller, spreading his ideas and arguments and advancing his chances for election to the office of president in 1860.
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, 237.

10Lincoln delivered a public speech in Jacksonville, Illinois, on September 27. Owen Lovejoy was not present. Lovejoy was running for reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives in the election of 1858 and was a controversial figure within the Republican Party on account of his fervent abolitionism. Many Republicans believed the controversy surrounding Lovejoy’s views was detrimental to the party as a whole and to Lincoln’s chances in the senatorial race, particularly since Democrats such as Douglas were keen to brand all Republicans as radical abolitionists. Recognizing Lovejoy’s great popularity among the people in his district, Lincoln supported Lovejoy’s reelection bid and even personally warned Lovejoy of potential plots to entice a Republican to run against him. Although his political support for Lovejoy brought some recrimination upon Lincoln, it likely prevented voters in Lovejoy’s district from turning against Lincoln and his fellow Republicans. Nevertheless, Lincoln did not go out of his way to be publicly associated with Lovejoy, which may explain why he did not use his influence to bring Lovejoy along when he spoke in Jacksonville.
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; The Illinois State Journal, 29 September 1858, 2:7; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 3 July 1858, 2:1; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:456; Abraham Lincoln to Owen Lovejoy.

11In Illinois’s local elections of 1858, voters in the Third Congressional District reelected Lovejoy to the U.S. House with a strong majority. Voters in Morgan County’s legislative districts elected Democrats Cyrus Epler and Elisha B. Hitt to the Illinois House of Representatives. Cyrus W. Vanderen, a member of the American Party elected to represent Sangamon and Morgan counties in the Illinois Senate 1856, held over in 1858.
In the state’s local elections as a whole, Republicans won a majority of all votes cast in the state, but pro-Douglas Democrats retained control of the Illinois General Assembly and Douglas ultimately won reelection to the U.S. Senate. Vanderen cast his vote for Lincoln; both Epler and Hitt cast their ballots for Douglas. Through the campaign, however, and in particular through his participation in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln gained recognition as well as standing within the national Republican Party.
Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 27 November 1858, 2:2; The Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 17 November 1858, 2:4; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 219, 221; Daily Illinois State Register (Springfield), 31 October 1883, 3:4; Illinois Senate Journal. 1859. 21st G. A., 30; Illinois House Journal. 1859. 21st G. A., 32; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:458, 556-57; Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” 392, 394, 414-16.

12Lincoln wrote this docketing in pencil vertically on the left side of the envelope shown in the fifth image.