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If this episode demonstrated anything, it was that prior political affiliations constituted a major obstacle to antislavery cooperation. The outcome left Lincoln bitterly disappointed. But his willingness to sacrifice personal ambition for political principle reinforced his standing among those opposed to the expansion of slavery. Once a statewide Republican party emerged in 1856, he became its presumptive candidate for the Senate in 1858, when Douglas’s term would expire. Meanwhile, Lyman Trumbull’s election deepened the split in the Democratic party and earned him the bitter enmity of Douglas and his supporters, who viewed him as “the quintessence of political and moral turpitude.” For their part, despite having backed Lincoln, the political abolitionists viewed the result as a triumph for their cause. At this point, because of his long record of defending the legal rights of the black community in Illinois, Trumbull had more of an antislavery reputation than Lincoln.24

Throughout 1855 and early 1856, the political situation in Illinois and throughout the North remained unsettled. “Bleeding Kansas”—violence between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the territory—kept the slavery issue on the front pages. But the successes of the Know-Nothings in state elections in 1855 suggested that they had as much chance of replacing the Whigs as the chief rival to the Democrats as a new antislavery coalition. Efforts to expand the fledgling Illinois Republican party made little headway. In August 1855, northern Illinois abolitionists, led by Owen Lovejoy, reached out to Lincoln, Trumbull, and other antislavery politicians, urging them to join the party they had created. Lovejoy promised that it would adopt a moderate platform, in recognition of the necessity of “not loading the middle and southern portions of the state with too heavy a load.”

Neither Lincoln nor Trumbull responded favorably. “Not even you,” Lincoln replied, “are more anxious to prevent the extension of slavery than I; and yet the political atmosphere is such, just now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong.” The main problem, he continued, was that the Know-Nothing party had not yet “tumbled to pieces.” Lincoln found the party’s views reprehensible but did not wish to attack it openly. In central Illinois, where the party attracted many Old Line Whigs who saw it as a way of suppressing the dangerous slavery question, the Know-Nothings, Lincoln wrote, consisted mostly of his “old political and personal friends” whose participation would be essential to any successful antislavery coalition. A few days later, Trumbull also rejected Lovejoy’s plea. He identified as the main obstacles to “fusion” the persistence of “old party associations, and side issues, such as Know-Nothingism and the Temperance question.” Trumbull, along with other prominent Illinois Democrats who had broken with Douglas, remained reluctant to join a new organization in which, they feared, they would occupy a position “at the tail end of the old Whig party.”25

Also in August 1855, Lincoln penned his often-quoted letter to Joshua Speed about the political situation:

You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist…. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery. I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.26

Clearly, Lincoln