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By Root 1765 0

It is not clear exactly when this possibility occurred to Lincoln. During the summer of 1854 he announced himself as a candidate for a seat in the legislature. Lincoln claimed he was running to help Yates’s campaign for Congress. But in August and September Lincoln began making speeches to audiences far afield from his and Yates’s district. Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures, not the voters, chose U.S. Senators. In November 1854, when the voters of Illinois chose a legislature with an “anti-Nebraska” majority, Lincoln resigned the seat to which he had been elected so that he could seek election to the Senate, which Illinois law barred members of the legislature from doing.20

Lincoln calculated that the new legislature consisted of fifty-seven anti-Nebraska members and forty-three Democrats. But the new majority comprised what one member called “discordant elements”—men elected as Republicans, Whigs, fusionists, anti-Nebraska Democrats, temperance advocates, and nativists. Lincoln began writing to legislators and to local political leaders throughout Illinois seeking their support for his Senate candidacy. Sometimes he described himself as a Whig; sometimes he avoided identifying a party affiliation. Those who considered themselves Whigs expressed support for Lincoln. But anti-Nebraska Democrats preferred one of their own.21

Many abolitionists and Free Soilers from northern Illinois considered Lincoln insufficiently antislavery. In the Free West, Zebina Eastman advised antislavery members of the legislature not to vote for Lincoln “or any of the moderate men of his stamp.” Lincoln, Eastman claimed, not only remained loyal to “that mummy of a Whig party,” but also “dares not oppose the Fugitive Slave Law.” Lincoln’s Kentucky birth and family connections worried some antislavery advocates. “I must confess I am afraid of ‘Abe,’” the Chicago editor Charles H. Ray wrote to Elihu B. Washburne, who had just won reelection to Congress. “He is southern by birth, southern in his associations, and southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies. I have thought that he would not come squarely up to the mark in a hand to hand fight with southern influence and dictation. His wife, you, know, is a Todd, of a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin.”

At Lincoln’s request, Washburne launched a campaign to swing northern Illinois radicals to Lincoln’s candidacy. He approached Ohio congressman Joshua R. Giddings, who had admired Lincoln since they lived together and cooperated in seeking to end slavery in the nation’s capital in 1849. Giddings, Washburne reported to Lincoln, “is your strongest possible friend and says he would walk clear to Illinois to elect you.” Giddings promised to write on Lincoln’s behalf to the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, one of the newly elected members of the legislature. Washburne assured Eastman that Lincoln was “a man of splendid talents, of great probity of character, and…threw himself into the late fight on the republican platform and made the greatest speech in reply to Douglas ever heard in the state.” “I know he is with us in sentiment,” Washburne added.22

Washburne and Giddings succeeded in convincing the “extreme Anti-Slavery men,” as Lincoln called them, including Lovejoy. When voting began, they all supported Lincoln, who received forty-four votes on the first ballot. Senator Shields tallied forty-one; five anti-Nebraska Democrats, unwilling to back a Whig, supported Lyman Trumbull; and eight legislators scattered their votes among other candidates. As balloting continued, Lincoln found it impossible to gain the votes of Trumbull’s supporters, and without them he could not reach the required majority. Suddenly, Democrats abandoned Shields and appeared within reach of electing Governor Joel Matteson, a Democrat not associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “Taken by surprise,” as he put it, and unwilling to see the possibility of electing an antislavery senator disappear, Lincoln ordered his backers to cast their votes for Trumbull, ensuring his victory on