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By Root 1607 0

Lincoln’s overheated rhetoric, the speech repeated ideas that dozens of his Whig colleagues, from all parts of the country, were also saying. In the same month that Lincoln spoke, one Whig member of Congress described Polk as the second-worst president in history (Jackson presumably being the worst); another called the president’s claims about the war “monstrous” a third charged that Polk had committed “acts of injustice, cruelty, and wrong.” Many Whigs echoed Lincoln’s claim that the place where war began “was not American soil.” Indeed, Lincoln’s “spot resolutions,” calling for further information from the president, seemed mild compared with the demand of some Whig colleagues that the president order the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Mexico.44

In Illinois, however, which sent more volunteers to Mexico than any state other than Missouri, Lincoln’s speech created a furor. One Democratic meeting described it as “treasonable.” Herndon informed him of the unhappiness of many Illinois Whigs, himself included. Earlier in the 1840s, Whigs in Lincoln’s district had agreed that the congressional seat would be occupied for a single term by a series of party leaders. Lincoln, therefore, could not be renominated. But his position on the Mexican War seems to have contributed to the defeat of Stephen T. Logan, his party’s nominee to succeed him, in 1848. For the rest of his career, Lincoln would be dogged by accusations about his course during the Mexican War. In their 1858 debates, Stephen A. Douglas charged him several times with siding with the enemy in wartime. As late as 1863, when Lincoln approved the arrest of Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio for an antiwar speech on the grounds that his words would discourage enlistments, Democrats responded that on the same principle, Lincoln ought to have been arrested during the Mexican War.45

Lincoln’s attack on Polk dealt with the origins of the war, not its consequences. Unlike many other northern Whigs, he did not charge Polk with acting in order to acquire territory from Mexico to promote the expansion of slavery. Indeed, he explicitly denied that the war had “originated for the purpose of extending slave territory.” Lincoln did not want the divisive slavery question to play a part in the 1848 campaign. Many northern Whigs disagreed. Calling the convention that nominated Zachary Taylor the “slaughter-house of Whig principles,” the so-called Conscience Whigs joined with Democrats opposed to the expansion of slavery to form the Free Soil party, with Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams as its nominees. The party aroused great enthusiasm, and to blunt its appeal, Democrats and Whigs throughout the North promised that they would prevent the westward expansion of slavery. Nonetheless, Van Buren won around 15 percent of the northern vote, a remarkable showing for a new party. The fact that a former president and the son and grandson of another had agreed to bolt their respective parties and run on a platform embracing not only non-extension but also the Liberty party’s call for the divorce of the federal government from slavery demonstrated, William H. Seward observed, that antislavery had at length become “a respectable element in politics.”46

In August 1848, as soon as the congressional session ended, Lincoln embarked on a tour of Massachusetts to give campaign speeches for Taylor. To counteract the Free Soil appeal, Lincoln called the Whigs the real antislavery party. Taylor may not have spoken in favor of the Wilmot Proviso, he argued, but as a Whig who believed in legislative supremacy, he would not veto it if passed by Congress. Democrats, on the other hand, would allow slavery to spread into the West. Thus, to avoid the mistake of 1844, when a split antislavery vote enabled Polk to win the election, Free Soilers should support Taylor.47

During this campaign tour, Lincoln shared the platform with William H. Seward, who also supported Taylor but whose speeches went much further on the slavery question. Seward had a far more extensive antislavery record