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By Root 1644 0

’s senatorial ambitions. Horace Greeley, perhaps the most influential Republican journalist, whose New York Tribune circulated widely throughout the North, urged Illinois Republicans to support Douglas’s reelection to the Senate. Lincoln was dismayed. “What does the New-York Tribune mean,” he wrote anxiously to Lyman Trumbull, “by its constant eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas? Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois?” Trumbull responded that, in his view, no “honest Republican” could embrace Douglas: “The idea is preposterous.”11

Most Illinois Republicans agreed. When the Republican state convention met in Springfield on June 16, 1858, party leaders decisively rebuffed eastern calls to embrace Douglas. The platform made no concessions to popular sovereignty: it called for barring slavery from all the territories and denounced the Dred Scott decision and the entire idea of the “extraterritorial operation” of slave law. In an unprecedented move, the delegates named Lincoln the party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate. (Normally, such a decision awaited the convening of the next legislative session.) Half a century before a constitutional amendment provided for the popular election of senators, the Illinois legislative campaign of 1858 in effect became a referendum on whether Lincoln or Douglas should represent the state in Washington.12

The highlight of the convention was Lincoln’s speech launching his campaign. In May he had written to a fellow Republican, “There remains all the difference there ever was between Judge Douglas and the Republicans.” Now he set out to demolish the idea that Republicans could in good conscience support Douglas, by linking his opponent to the designs of the slave South and denying that any middle ground existed between the friends and foes of slavery. Underlining his words for vocal emphasis, Lincoln began by addressing the consequences of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854:

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition?13

That last seemingly anticlimactic sentence was crucial. In the remainder of the speech, Lincoln spelled out the “tendency” toward the nationalization of slavery. He accused Douglas of participating in a broad conspiracy involving Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney, to make slavery legal throughout the United States. Already, the Supreme Court had deprived blacks of the protection of the Constitution’s comity clause requiring states to accord citizens of other states the same rights as their own. It had ruled that slavery could not be barred from any territory and that Scott’s temporary residence in the free state of Illinois had not made him free. The final step would be a ruling that a master could lawfully bring his slaves into any free state for any length of time he desired. Once the Dred Scott decision had been “apparently indorsed by the people” (presumably by Douglas’s reelection), such a ruling would be inevitable. “We shall lie down,” Lincoln warned,