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durable element of popular action” and that northerners should unite in making opposition to the expansion of slavery their central political tenet. But this belief did not immediately produce a formula for political action. Eventually, the collapse of the Whig party freed Lincoln from the pressure of reconciling his views on slavery with the need for intersectional party harmony. But the dissolution of Whiggery took place slowly. The Nebraska bill, declared the New York Tribune in 1854, “inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties.” But not until late in 1855 did Lincoln commit his political future to a sectional antislavery party.15

The year 1854 witnessed an extremely complicated political revolution throughout the North. “Fusion” movements uniting Whigs, antislavery Democrats, Free Soilers, and advocates of prohibition and nativism swept to victory in nearly every free state. But the balance of power within these coalitions varied enormously. In some states, the new Know-Nothing party, dedicated to curtailing the influence of immigrants and Roman Catholics in American politics, emerged as the primary force. In others, antislavery advocates, some calling their new organization the Republican party, dominated.16

Whig leaders like Lincoln struggled to adjust to the rapidly changing political situation. Many Whigs hoped the furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act offered their party an opportunity to resuscitate itself by advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, thus appealing both to Americans who opposed the expansion of slavery and to those, including southerners, who dreaded the revival of sectional controversy. But it soon became clear that the political crisis had resulted in what a southern newspaper called the “denationalization of the Whig party.” In February 1854, a caucus of southern Whig congressmen decided to support Douglas’s measure. Northern Whigs were outraged. “We have no longer any bond to Southern Whigs,” proclaimed William H. Seward. Even Seward, however, remained convinced that the Whigs could survive by refashioning themselves as the party of opposition to the expansion of slavery.17

Especially in central and southern Illinois, many Whigs looked aghast at the idea of their party “being abolitionized,” as Lincoln’s friend David Davis put it. When a group of abolitionists and Free Soilers from northern Illinois met in Springfield on October 5 to launch a Republican party in the state, Lincoln declined an invitation to address them, even though his powerful antislavery speech, which he had delivered in the same city the previous day, had included a call for political cooperation among all those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He turned down an appointment to the executive committee of the new party. As Lincoln explained to the abolitionist Ichabod Codding, one of the gathering’s organizers, “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong” as any member of the convention, but he felt unable to “carry that opposition, practically,” in the way Codding desired. Lincoln could scarcely join a new party that seemed to have no support in his political base of central Illinois.18

“Probably not since the organization of the government,” declared a Chicago newspaper, “were political parties in such a state of inextricable confusion.” In the congressional races that fall, Illinois Whigs “fused” with Free Soilers in three northern congressional districts, offered their own candidates in five districts in the central and southern parts of the state, and in one race endorsed Lyman Trumbull, running as an anti-Douglas Democrat. Trumbull, the three fusionists, and one Whig were elected, but in the Springfield region Democrats defeated Richard Yates, for whom Lincoln had campaigned. To the Free West, Chicago’s abolitionist newspaper, the lesson was clear: “the Whig party is dead.”19

Further complicating Lincoln’s situation was his emergence as a leading candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by James Shields, an ally of Douglas’s whose term was about to expire.