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alienate former Democrats. The platform, written by Lincoln’s old Whig legislative colleague Orville H. Browning with the assistance of Lincoln and Trumbull, called for preventing the extension of slavery “into territories heretofore free,” a less radical demand than barring the institution from all territories, and a far cry from Republican platforms in more radical states that called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and the complete divorce of the federal government from slavery. In the name of party unity, Lincoln pressed for the nomination of William H. Bissell, an anti-Nebraska Democrat from southern Illinois, for governor. To appeal to German-American voters, the convention nominated one of their leaders, Francis Hoffmann, for lieutenant governor, but the rest of the ticket consisted of former Know-Nothings. Nonetheless, the platform opposed all discrimination “on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth.”

Lincoln delivered the convention’s major speech. He electrified the audience with, in the words of one reporter, “the power of his argument, the intense irony of his invective, and the deep earnestness and fervid brilliancy of his eloquence.” So “spell bound” were his listeners that journalists ceased taking notes—hence Lincoln’s remarks have been known ever since as his “lost speech.” Whatever Lincoln said, Zebina Eastman later claimed that after the convention “there was no longer any opposition to Mr. Lincoln from the most radical of the abolitionists.”30 To be sure, the abolitionists and Free Soilers who had tried to create a Republican party in 1854 had little influence in the newly reconstituted organization. But Lovejoy did address the Bloomington convention, and Lincoln made clear that he and his supporters must be a part of the broad antislavery coalition. Meanwhile, Ichabod Codding shrewdly predicted that disappointing as the platform seemed, “the Republicans will be driven to take the whole Anti-Slavery issue before they are through with this controversy.”31

The Bloomington convention appointed delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention, which met in June 1856 in Philadelphia. There, the atmosphere proved distinctly more radical than in Illinois. The temporary president, Robert Emmet of New York, opened the proceedings by proclaiming, to “long continued cheering,” that any “honest man…who respects the immortal Declaration of Independence” hoped to see the day when slavery “shall not exist in the world.” The resolutions called on Congress to admit Kansas as a free state and to prohibit in the territories the “twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery” (an appeal to anti-Mormon sentiment). It insisted that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had the power to “give legal existence to slavery” in any territory. In a mild slap at the Know-Nothings, the platform reaffirmed the right of all Americans to “liberty of conscience” and opposed legislation impairing the “security” of any group.

Frederick Douglass condemned the Republican platform for ignoring every critical question except Kansas: “Nothing said of the Fugitive Slave Bill—nothing said of slavery in the District of Columbia—nothing said of the slave trade between the states.” Yet the radical element within the party announced itself pleased with the language, evidently drafted by Joshua R. Giddings, that described slavery as unconstitutional outside of state jurisdiction. Salmon P. Chase wondered whether the delegates fully understood “what broad principles they were avowing.” They had endorsed, he noted, “the denationalization entire,” an idea “first promulgated by the Liberty party” in the early 1840s. George W. Julian, the leading Indiana Radical (and Giddings’s son-in-law), claimed that the logic of the Republican platform would lead inexorably to abolition in the District of Columbia and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act.32

When it came to choosing the party’s first presidential candidate, the convention eschewed established political leaders of all kinds and settled on John