During the election of 1854, fusion tickets became common, as disaffected Whigs and Democrats banded together with Free Soilers, Nativists, and temperance advocates. See the 1854 Federal Election. Maine’s legislature obtained a fusionist majority during the election, and elected fusionist candidate Anson P. Morrill governor. In March 1855, the legislature passed a new law that significantly toughened enforcement of existing temperance legislation. It permitted citizens to lodge complaints against those suspected of violating the law, and allowed judges use such complaints to issue search warrants for private homes and businesses. The law also made possession of liquor evidence of intent to violate the law, thus shifting the burden of proof from the state to prove the accused’s guilt to individuals to prove their innocence. This legislation proved controversial and unpopular among numerous constituencies.

In 1855, Morrill ran for re-election as the candidate of the state’s newly-created Republican Party, which remained dependent upon support from a variety of political coalitions—including fusionist Democrats. As Gidding notes above, Maine’s Democrats were unwilling to emphasize issues other than temperance during the election. Hard-line Democrats in Maine, also called Pierce Democrats, launched a political strategy in which they avoided topics that aided the fusionist cause—namely, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the issue of slavery—and instead focused their campaign on the fusionists’ new, unpopular temperance legislation. This strategy was a success, resulting in striking defeats for Maine’s new Republican Party. Democrats won an overwhelming majority in the Maine Senate and Morrill lost his bid for re-election to Pierce Democrat Samuel Wells, leading some to fear that the Republican Party’s losses in Maine might hinder the so-called “Republican movement” not just in that state, but throughout the nation.

At the time Giddings penned this letter, Lincoln was in Cincinnati, Ohio for trial of the case McCormick v. Talcott et al., which commenced on September 20. He departed home for Springfield, Illinois on Wednesday, September 26—the very day Giddings had invited him to attend the meeting in Jacksonville, Illinois with he, Archibald Williams, and Richard Yates.

By October 4, Giddings and Codding had lectured in seventeen Illinois counties. Although their campaign was received more enthusiastically in northern Illinois than in the central and southern sections of the state, it led to calls for a statewide Republican Party convention and was deemed a success. Giddings’ efforts to enlist Lincoln’s support for and public commitment to the new Republican Party, however, were less successful. Lincoln remained committed to the Whig Party throughout 1855.