The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [54]
The disappointing outcome nonetheless offered grounds for Republican optimism. It represented a remarkable showing for a party that had not existed two years earlier. In key northern states, Buchanan enjoyed only a narrow margin of victory. His plurality over Frémont in Illinois slightly exceeded 9,000 votes (around 3 percent of the total turnout), but William Bissell, the Republican candidate for governor, was elected along with the rest of the state ticket. Clearly, the key to the state’s future politics lay with the 37,000 voters, almost all of them in southern and central Illinois, who had chosen Fillmore. With the Know-Nothings disintegrating under the pressure of the same slavery issue that had destroyed the Whig party, it did not seem unrealistic to assume that a significant part of the Fillmore vote could be attracted to the Republicans the next time around.37
Moreover, rapid changes in the state’s economy and its population augured well for future Republican success. By the mid-1850s, great East-West trunk lines connected Chicago with Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York; the Illinois Central Railroad traversed the state from north to south; and feeder lines crisscrossed the prairies. The development of the rail network catalyzed a transformation of economic life in Illinois, bringing the final triumph of the market revolution. Milton Hay, the uncle of Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, later recalled the coming of the railroad as the “dividing line in point of time between the old and the new. Not only our homemade manufactures, but our homemade life and habits to a great measure disappeared…. We farmed not only with different implements but in a different mode. Then we began to inquire what the markets were and what product of the farm we could raise and sell to the best advantage.”
The railroad transformed Chicago’s agricultural hinterland, a vast area including northern and central Illinois and parts of Iowa and Wisconsin, into one of the world’s preeminent centers of commercial agriculture. By 1860, Illinois led the nation in corn and wheat production. Its economy reoriented itself from south to east. Railroads shipped farm goods previously sent to New Orleans to the burgeoning cities of the Atlantic seaboard, weakening the state’s ties to the slave South. Fewer and fewer men would take goods down the river for sale, as Lincoln had done in his youth. Indeed, in one of his most celebrated legal cases of the 1850s, Lincoln successfully defended a company that had built a railroad bridge across the Mississippi River against a suit by owners of a steamboat that had crashed into the bridge and burned. He had “no prejudice against steamboats or steamboatmen,” Lincoln told the jury, but “there is a travel from East to West,…growing larger and larger” and essential to the continuation of “the astonishing growth of Illinois.”38
Lincoln’s rise coincided with that of Illinois. The 1850 population of 851,000 doubled to 1.7 million ten years later, making Illinois the nation’s fourth largest state. Much of this increase occurred in the rapidly growing counties of northern Illinois, the heartland of the new Republican party. Farmers and laborers poured into Illinois from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and overseas. By 1860, only 10 percent of the state’s population had, like Lincoln and most of the early settlers, been born in the South; a full