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By Root 1710 0

despised the nativists. As early as 1844, he had helped to organize a public meeting in Springfield that denied that the Whig party harbored “hostility…to foreigners and Catholics.” Ten years later, during his campaign for a seat in the legislature, he turned down the endorsement of the Sangamon County Know-Nothings. (Characteristically, he told a story to the party delegation that came to see him. He had asked his immigrant Irish gardener Patrick, Lincoln recounted, why he had not been born in the United States. “Faith, Mr. Lincoln,” Patrick replied, “I wanted to be, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”) Nonetheless, Lincoln said, the Know-Nothings were welcome to vote for him if they wished. He only expressed his strong antinativist views in private, knowing that no antislavery coalition could succeed without Know-Nothing support.27

As late as November 1855, the Illinois State Journal insisted that “this Republican movement” could never “prove the basis of a permanent party” in the state. But soon afterward, Lincoln decided that the time had come to “fuse.” In January 1856, leading antislavery Whigs and Democrats, almost certainly including Lincoln, agreed to form a new party devoted to preventing the westward expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, Paul Selby, who ran a newspaper in Jacksonville, Illinois, had called for the state’s antislavery editors to gather in Decatur on February 22, 1856, to plan a strategy for the upcoming state and national elections.

Because of a snowstorm, only a dozen newspapermen made it to Decatur. Lincoln was the only nonjournalist present, and he helped to draft resolutions that deftly covered both moderate and radical antislavery ground. The resulting platform disclaimed any intention to interfere with slavery in the southern states, affirmed the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise rather than barring slavery from all territories. These were moderate positions. But the resolutions also adopted the “freedom national” doctrine of more radical Republicans, holding that in any place under national jurisdiction, freedom was “the rule” and slavery “the exception.” In a nod to the Know-Nothings, the resolutions denounced “attacks” on the public school system (supposedly emanating from Catholics), while to appeal to immigrant voters it opposed any changes in the naturalization laws and defended the principle of religious freedom—positions advocated by a German-American editor and supported by Lincoln. “We have no doubt,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune, “that the platform laid down will be satisfactory to the Anti Nebraska men of all sections of the state, no matter what their political antecedents or present political affiliations.” The editors called a convention to meet at Bloomington in May to nominate candidates for state office.28

Lincoln threw himself into the fusion movement, even as most of his local political associates held back. Three years later, a resident of Springfield would recall in a newspaper letter how Lincoln “started out in this city, almost solitary and alone, as a defender of the Republican party and the Republican faith.” As the Bloomington convention approached, Lincoln worked behind the scenes to make sure that antislavery Know-Nothings, Democrats, and Whigs attended, and that none of them were put off by the presence of abolitionists like Ichabod Codding and Owen Lovejoy. Trumbull, too, urged his political allies to participate. Republicans, he assured reluctant anti-Nebraska Democrats, would take their stand on the principle of opposition to the expansion of slavery and “will I think be willing to abandon their ultraisms” for this “one issue.”29

As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would