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With the Peoria speech (delivered in essentially the same form in various parts of Illinois in the fall of 1854) Lincoln emerged as his state’s most eloquent opponent of the expansion of slavery. His public presentations, Lincoln later recalled, attracted “more marked attention than they had ever done before.” In part, this resulted from his exceptional clarity of expression and his reliance on the logic of his argument rather than rhetorical ornamentation to persuade his listeners. In his preference for direct speech and the language of ordinary life he resembled Thomas Paine, whose works he had read and admired as a younger man. As a writer, Lincoln was indeed a conscious craftsman who chose his words, as a friend later wrote, to “make himself understood by all classes.” Horace White, then a young antislavery journalist and later editor-in-chief of the Chicago Tribune, heard Lincoln deliver his address in Springfield, twelve days before he did so in Peoria. He described it as the “greatest” speech ever delivered in Illinois, “for vigor of thought, strength of expression, comprehensiveness of scope…rarely equalled in the annals of American eloquence.” Half a century later, White would write that “the speech of 1854 made so profound an impression on me that I feel under its spell to this day.”8

Although Lincoln subsequently deepened and expanded his arguments, the Peoria speech laid the foundation for his approach to the slavery question for the next six years. Before 1854, Lincoln had mentioned the Declaration of Independence only twice in public remarks—a passing reference in his Lyceum speech of 1838 and a more extended one in the Clay eulogy of 1852. Henceforth, he would repeatedly invoke the Declaration as the basis of what he had once called America’s “civil religion.” He knew that the Declaration’s theme of equality had a powerful effect on ordinary northerners. In 1858, he would describe the Declaration as the “electric cord…that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.” In Philadelphia on the way to assuming the presidency in 1861, Lincoln would declare that all his political sentiments sprang from the Declaration of Independence.9

Lincoln was hardly alone among critics of slavery in claiming inspiration from Jefferson, who in 1784 had unsuccessfully proposed to bar the institution from all the western territories then part of the United States. (The Northwest Ordinance, enacted in 1787 when Jefferson was in Paris, included Jefferson’s rejected language, but applied it only to territories north of the Ohio River).10 Nor did Lincoln originate the idea that the founders had launched the nation on an antislavery course. Garrisonian abolitionists, who “ransacked the past for the needs of the present,” repeatedly made this argument. So did Liberty party leaders such as Salmon P. Chase. In 1850, Chase filled three single-spaced pages of the Congressional Globe with quotations from letters by Jefferson and Madison, town meeting resolutions, congressional debates, and other documents to demonstrate the antislavery convictions of the revolutionary era. In the 1850s no Republican campaign speech or political platform could be considered complete without references to Jefferson and other founders to demonstrate that they hoped for an end to slavery. By 1860, one Republican member of Congress could assure his colleagues that he would not “weary” them with such quotations since the evidence would “readily occur to all intelligent men.” Lincoln did not originate this part of the Republican outlook, but he played a key role in disseminating it to a broad popular audience.11

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Like any narration of history inspired by the search for a “usable past,” Lincoln’s and other Republicans’ account of the attitudes of the revolutionary generation toward slavery was highly selective. It required them to transform a hesitant, ambiguous commitment