Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln’s Quincy Connections

City of Quincy Lincoln Bicentennial Commission 706 Maine Quincy, Illinois 62301

As a Springfield lawyer who rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit in Central and Eastern Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had little reason to travel as far west as Quincy. But through his many Quincy friends and colleagues, whom he met as a young state legislator and as an attorney who handled several law cases with Quincy lawyers, he was familiar with the Mississippi River community. His Quincy connections would provide important services to the tall Republican politician destined to become the sixteenth president of the United States.

As he had done, many of Lincoln’s Quincy associates had migrated from Kentucky into Illinois, law and politics. But unlike most, he was self-made. Lincoln had less than a year of formal education. Encouraged by John Todd Stuart of Springfield, a fellow soldier in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln read and took up law. Admitted to practice in 1836 – Stephen A. Douglas was among Lincoln’s friends attending the swearing in, Lincoln in 1837 moved from New Salem to Springfield where he joined Stuart’s law firm.

Losing his first attempt for political office in 1832, Lincoln in 1834 was elected to the first of his four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives. At the Vandalia state house, Lincoln joined fellow Whigs Archibald Williams and Orville Hickman Browning of Quincy, who had been elected to the Illinois Senate. Lincoln was impressed with both men. In 1836 he would vote for Williams to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. The legislature at the time elected the state’s representative in the U.S. Senate. And as president in 1861, Lincoln was glad to welcome Browning to Washington as U.S. Senator.

At the time of their first meeting in Vandalia Lincoln didn’t think much of the young man from Morgan County who was lobbying for a bill to benefit himself. Lincoln considered Stephen A. Douglas “the least man I ever saw.” But the two would become friends, suitors for the same Springfield woman, and frequent opponents in political contests.

Lincoln was the manager of his Sangamon County delegation, called the Long Nine, in its efforts to get the state capitol moved from Vandalia to Springfield in 1837. Their device was the offer of a statewide Internal Improvements program, by which they traded votes – called logrolling then, pork today – with other legislators. Browning voted for the proposal but Quincy’s William Alexander Richardson voted against it. Springfield got the capitol, but at a cost for Internal Improvements that nearly bankrupt the state.

Voters sent Lincoln to Congress in 1847, where he challenged President James Polk to prove that Mexican soldiers had attacked America’s army on United States soil. Polk ignored Lincoln’s so-called “spot resolution,” but Lincoln’s constituents did not. They misinterpreted Lincoln’s attack as not supporting the troops, who were still stationed in Texas. Newspapers in his own district called him “Spotty Lincoln.” With little more to distinguish him – and with an unhappy electorate, he decided not to seek a second term. He returned to Springfield and a successful law practice.

In 1854, Douglas as chairman of the Senate Committee on the Territories steamrolled through Congress – with important assistance from Quincy’s Richardson in the House – the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Nebraska, as it was called, enabled the expansion of slavery, a concession the South forced for the organization of the Nebraska territory. Kansas-Nebraska was the death-knell to the Whig party, whose northern and southern wings disagreed over its impact. A true believer in the party of his beau ideal statesman Henry Clay, Lincoln remained a Whig almost until its last gasp. In February 1856, however, he joined a group of former Whig newspaper editors, including the editor of the Quincy Whig, in Decatur who sought to form a new party of former Whigs and others upset over Kansas-Nebraska. Later that year, Illinois’s new Republican party was formed in Bloomington, where Lincoln gave a speech said to be so passionate and engaging that no transcript was taken. Historians call it Lincoln’s “Lost Speech.”

Also in 1856, Republican Lincoln sought election as U.S. Senator. When he recognized he had no chance, he threw his support to Lyman Trumbull. Although a Democrat, Trumbull was anti-Nebraska and Lincoln’s political sacrifice won him favor. Republicans meeting in convention in June 1858 recommended him as their “first and only choice” for the U.S. Senate.

Lincoln’s first visit to Quincy on November 1, 1854, answered a request by Whig friend and Quincy’s first Jewish attorney, Abraham Jonas, to speak on behalf of Archibald Williams, who once again was running for the U.S. Senate. After dining at the Browning home, Lincoln addressed a large crowd at the Kendall’s Hall at Eighth and Maine (the location of today’s Kirlin’s store), touting Williams but also hitting Douglas and his Nebraska bill.

Jonas helped arrange Lincoln’s next visit to Quincy on October 13, 1858 for the sixth Senate debate with Douglas. The two men had debated on other occasions – including free wheeling discussions many years earlier as Springfield newcomers with other young men at Joshua Speed’s Springfield general store. Their debates in 1858, with slavery the paramount issue, were among the most serious the nation had seen. Lincoln believed slavery was immoral and no vote – which Douglas provided in the popular sovereignty provision of his Nebraska bill – could make a wrong right. Douglas argued that it was not a moral issue but a legal one: the framers of the Constitution had authorized slavery.

By virtue of his re-election to the Senate, Douglas won the debate (although Lincoln early had complained that the legislature’s reapportionment in the state after a recent census had doomed his chances). But the nation took note of the prairie lawyer’s positions. In 1860, when the two men faced each other again, Lincoln was elected to the Presidency. It was a role, he told his Springfield neighbors as he left the city for Washington in February 1861, that would be more demanding than Washington’s. And although he – and Douglas, who died in June 1861 – appealed to north and south to remain one nation, the south seceded.

And the war came.

Ambrotype,_circa_1853