Report of Speech of Leonard Swett to Abraham Lincoln, 4 September 18581
Mr. Lincoln:—I have been deputed on behalf of the citizens of this county to welcome you on this occasion.2 As a friend and known admirer of your talents and your character, I enter cheerfully
upon this duty, sharing prominently with the thousands who surround us,3 the [zeal] and affection which have suggested this reception. For many years, in the exercise
of the profession you have honored, you have frequently visited this county.4 With a great majority of its people your personal acquaintance, associated with
the pioneer history of the West, has, in the lapse of years, ripened into affectionate
regard: here now number many of your most devoted friends—here are associations of
endearment deeply rooted in the past; and our whole people, by the intimacy of their
acquaintance with your character and affectionate sympathy and regard claim you at
least as “an adopted son of their race.”5
I should therefore but partially perform my duty, and violate greatly my own feelings,
if I should extend to you on this occasion merely a political welcome. We would all
give utterance to feelings of profound personal regard, as well as express to you
our most ardent sympathies in the great struggle in which you are engaged.
Our government which has bequeathed the blessing of civil liberty to the millions
of our land, is itself the child of political tyranny—the uprising throes of a people goaded to madness by oppression.
The present form of slavery was, at the achievement of our independence, an existing
institution. It had been forced upon our forefathers during their colonial dependence
by the power and cupidity of the mother country. After our independence the people for the first time controlled this subject. As
a nation we were then weak and chastened by affliction; but the fires of liberty were
aglow in every heart, and those generous hands which had rescued our freedom from
the “perilous ridges of the battle”6 sought to bestow its blessings upon all. The first work of our forefathers, therefore,
was to proclaim the territories, not polluted by slavery, forever free,7 to restrict as soon as practicable the further importation of slaves,8 and place the institution “where the public mind would rest in the belief that it
was in the course of ultimate extinction.”9 Since then time has wrought prodigious changes. State after State has been added
to our domain, city after city of almost magic growth has sprung suddenly into life
to adorn the slopes of our mighty rivers. Our commerce now floats on every sea, and
luxury folds the nation in its easy and seductive embrace. A change perhaps consequent
upon this in the political sentiment of the people is scarcely less striking. Our
forefathers’ policy of prohibiting the introduction of slavery into free territory is now claimed to
be a violation of the very constitution they made and gave us. The sentiments of
the great declaration for which they periled “their lives, their fortunes and their
sacred honor,”10 are now scoffed at and pronounced rhetorical flourishes. The whole policy to make
this country the great heritage of free men is subverted, and in its stead prevail
other maxims which, in their tendency, nationalize and perpetuate the crowning evil
of our land.11
Our State has the doubtful honor of furnishing the author and standard-bearer of these new and startling heresies. After deserting—in that
final struggle his work had engendered and made essential to success—those companions with whom he started
in a career which has shaken the institutions of our country to their centre,12 he has returned to his people to be honored or censured for the course he has pursued.
You have been selected to enter the lists against him. You are the representative
of those who repudiate his heresies, and content themselves with the wisdom and policy
of Washington and Jefferson. Your great struggle with your adversary in this contest has not inappropriately been styled the “battle of the giants.” The eyes of the
nation are upon you. You are expected to deal heavy blows—to parry unscrupulous and
artful thrusts, to unmask every sophistry, and drag to light the naked deformity of
the dangerous policy you are combatting. In this struggle I offer you to-day not only the affectionate welcome of this people, but their entire approval of your
noble bearing on every field you have met your wary adversary. We have admired in
your great debates with him your coolness and circumspection, and smiled at the raging of the fretted
lion you have “bearded in his den.”13 We approve the sentiments which in those contests you have uttered, and honor the
ability and skill with which you have maintained them. “The past” with you “is at
least secure.”14 Go on as you have nobly begun; be cheered by the approval, the sympathy and unshaken
confidence of the thousands assembled here to greet you. We will meet you again,
when you shall have borne our standard to victory. We will then applaud your success,
and commit the destinies of our beautiful Prairie State confidently into your hands.15
1This report of Leonard Swett’s speech welcoming Abraham Lincoln to Bloomington, Illinois, appeared in the September 6, 1858 edition of The Daily Pantagraph.
The Daily Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), 6 September 1858, 2:2-3.
2Lincoln was scheduled to deliver a public speech in Bloomington on September 4 as
part of his campaign efforts on behalf of Republican candidates for the Illinois General Assembly. At the time, he was running as the Illinois Republican Party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate, trying to unseat incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. Both men traveled the state throughout the summer and fall of 1858, delivering speeches in support of candidates
for the General Assembly in their respective parties. Since members of the General
Assembly voted for and elected the state’s representatives in the U.S. Senate, the
races for the Illinois House of Representatives and Illinois Senate were highly relevant to the outcome of the U.S. Senate race. Lincoln spoke at the conclusion of Swett’s speech. See the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention.
Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 4 September 1858, 2:1; 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), 392-94; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 4 September 1858, https://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1858-09-04; The Daily Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), 6 September 1858, 2:3-5.
3The Daily Pantagraph reported that at least 7,000 people attended Lincoln’s September 4 speech in Bloomington.
The Daily Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), 6 September 1858, 2:2.
4This is a reference to Lincoln’s time as an attorney, during which he traveled throughout
Illinois on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, including through McLean County.
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 104-6, 147.
5This is an allusion to the work of Sir Walter Scott. The phrase, “an adopted son of
their race”, appears in the so-called Waverley Novels, a collection of more than two
dozen novels Scott wrote beginning in 1814 with Waverley. In Waverley, the character Fergus tells the protagonist, Waverley, to remember in the future,
whenever he hears the troubles of the Scottish peoples, that “you have worn their
tartan, and are an adopted son of their race.”
Waverley; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1814), 3:318.
6Edward Everett appears to have coined the phrase “perilous ridges of battle” during an address he
delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1826, when discussing the enduring significance of the American Revolution on the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Arguing that
it was the responsibility of the United States to spread liberty across the world,
he stated that the U.S. must “tear her star-spangled banner from the perilous ridges
of battle, and plant it on the rock of the ages.”
Edward Everett, An Oration Delivered at Cambridge on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence of the United States of America (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1826), 48; Daily National Journal (Washington, DC), 28 July 1826, 2:1-5.
8This is a reference to article one, section nine of the U.S. Constitution, which laid
forth 1808 as the year that the U.S. Congress could prohibit the international slave trade.
U.S. Const. art. I, § 9.
9This is a quote from Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech at the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention. In the speech, he asserted that, “Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the
further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief
that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward,
till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well
as South.” Lincoln repeated this assertion during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
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; 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.
10This is a quotation of part of the final sentence in the Declaration of Independence:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of
divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our
sacred Honor.”
Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:432.
12This is a reference to Douglas’s opposition to the Lecompton Constitution as a method for bringing the Kansas Territory into the Union, despite the fact that he had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the U.S. Senate in January 1854 while chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on
the Territories.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:445-48; Jeannette P. Nichols, “Kansas-Nebraska Act,” Dictionary of American History, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 4:29.
13To “beard the lion in his den” is an expression meaning to attack and defeat a dangerous
foe in their own territory. During his aforementioned House Divided speech, Lincoln
had famously called Douglas a “caged and toothless” lion.
James Dixon, Dixon’s Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases (Tokyo: Kyoyekishosha, 1887), 11-12; 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.
14Swett is quoting Daniel Webster. During a speech in the U.S. Senate on January 26, 1830 as part of a debate with
Senator Robert Y. Hayne, Webster was discussing a resolution related to public lands and, in making a point
related to the history of Massachusetts, stated, “The past, at least, is secure.”
6 Cong. Deb. 72 (1830).
15Lincoln acknowledged Swett’s remarks before launching into his own speech.
In the local elections of 1858, Republicans won a majority of all votes cast in the
state. However, because pro-Douglas Democrats retained control of the Illinois General
Assembly, Douglas ultimately won reelection to the U.S. Senate. Through the campaign,
however, and in particular through his participation in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates,
Lincoln gained recognition and respect within the national 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), Daily Pantagraph , (Bloomington, IL) , 6 September 1858, 2:2-3. .