Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Summary of Speech at Henry, Illinois, 23 August 18581

Lincoln then arose amid thunders of applause. His speech was an admirable effort, high-toned, honorable, candid and fair; and for nearly two hours he was listened to with the most marked attention and interest. He triumphantly refuted the charges bro’t[brought] against him by Douglas of being an abolitionist and an amalgamationist, and convicted his honorable opponent of endeavoring to ride two hobby-horses which can neither go ‘tandem’ nor abreast, because they stand tail to tail and must go in opposite directions.2—No man, not even Senator Douglas can ever drive “Dred Scott” and “Squatter Sovereignty” together without wholly emasculating the latter, the pet “original” of the great groomsman.3 He wound up his two hour’s speech, during the whole of which he riveted on himself the attention of his twenty-five hundred hearers, in a strain of homely but fervid eloquence, and left the conviction in the hearts of his hearers that they had listened, for once at least in their lives, to the speech of a politician who is not a demagogue, but an honest, fearless and consistent statesman.

It is estimated that there were between two and three thousand persons present, and many old citizens think it was the largest assemblage ever seen in Henry.

1This transcription appeared in the August 27, 1858 edition of the Courier in Henry, Illinois.
Initially, Peleg S. Perley sent a petition to Abraham Lincoln on July 12, 1858, with the signatures of thirty Democrats and fifty Republicans, inviting him to visit Henry, Illinois. Lincoln agreed on August 3. The invitation stemmed from Lincoln’s recent nomination at the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention to run against incumbent 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 and Douglas both focused their campaign efforts on the former Whig stronghold of central Illinois, where the state legislative races were the closest.

Lincoln boarded a train at 3 a.m. on August 23 and arrived in Henry, Illinois, to address the town for several hours on his promised date. Perley introduced him to the crowd.

Marshall County was a northern Illinois county assumed to be strongly Republican in 1858, and that proved to be the case in the election of that year. Marshall was in the Eighth Illinois Senate District, where Republican George C. Bestor defeated Democrat William S. Moss, and the Forty-Second Illinois House District, which elected Republican John A. McCall over Democrat Washington E. Cook.
Allen C. Guelzo, “Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858,” The Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 392-99, 400-401; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:457-58, 476-77; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 4 November 1858, 3:2; Chicago Daily Press and Tribune, 5 November 1858, 1:3; The Weekly Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), 10 November 1858, 2:1; 24 November 1858, 2:3; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 219-22; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 23 August 1858, https://thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1858-08-23.

2In the fifth Lincoln-Douglas Debate on October 7 in Galesburg, Illinois, Douglas charged that Lincoln was an abolitionist, but only when politically convenient. He argued, “Abolitionists up north are expected and required to vote for Lincoln because he goes for the equality of the races, holding that by the Declaration of Independence the white man and the negro were created equal and endowed by the Divine law with that equality, and down south he tells the old Whigs, the Kentuckians, Virginians, and Tennesseans, that there is a physical difference in the races, making one superior and the other inferior, and that he is in favor of maintaining the superiority of the white race over the negro.”
In a speech in Greenville, Illinois on September 13, Lincoln refuted the same charges from Douglas of being an abolitionist and amalgamationist, asserting that while he believed slavery to be a moral, social, and political evil, he also would not interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed.

An amalgamationist was believed to support the merging—or amalgamation—of the black and white races through, in this context, interracial marriage or sexual activity.

Fifth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois; Fifth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois; Fifth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois; “Amalgamation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amalgamation, accessed 1 April 2024; Webb Garrison and Cheryl Garrison, The Encyclopedia of Civil War Usage (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2001), 9.

3Douglas, unlike Lincoln and the Republicans, supported the decision in the Dred Scott case, which effectively barred any current or future emancipated slave from the right of United States citizenship and solidified the right of American citizens to transport their property wherever they wished—including taking an enslaved individual into a free state—without feared loss of that property. Douglas’s support for the Scott decision essentially invalidated his well established advocacy of the concept of popular sovereignty, which he argued allowed territorial and state governments to either allow or prohibit slavery as they saw fit. Lincoln’s main concern with popular sovereignty had been its power to “allow the people of a Territory to have Slavery if they want to, but does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it.” The Scott decision proved Lincoln’s assertion, to which he remarked, “as I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants slaves, all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them.”

Carl Brent Swisher, "Dred Scott Case," Dictionary of American History, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 2:167-68; 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.