In July Zachary Taylor had been nominated at Philadelphia for President by the Whigs. Lincoln had been at the convention, and went back to Washington full of enthusiasm. "In my opinion we shall have a most overwhelming, glorious triumph," he wrote a friend. "One unmistakable sign is that all the odds and ends are with us—Barnburners, Native Americans, Tyler men, disappointed office-seekers, Locofocos, and the Lord knows what. This is important, if in nothing else, in showing which way the wind blows."
In connection with Alexander H. Stephens, with whom he had become a warm friend, Toombs, and Preston, Lincoln formed the first Congressional Taylor Club, known as the "Young Indians." Campaigning had already begun on the floor of Congress, and the members were daily making speeches for the various candidates. On July 27th Lincoln made a speech for Taylor. It was a boisterous election speech, full of merciless caricaturing, and delivered with inimitable drollery. It kept the House in an uproar, and was reported the country over by the Whig press. The "Baltimore American," in giving a synopsis of it, called it the "crack speech of the day," and said of Lincoln: "He is a very able, acute, uncouth, honest, upright man, and a tremendous wag, withal.... Mr. Lincoln's manner was so good-natured, and his style so peculiar, that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment for the last half hour of his speech. He would commence a point in his speech far up one of the aisles, and keep on talking, gesticulating, and walking until he would find himself, at the end of a paragraph, down in the centre of the area in front of the clerk's desk. He would then go back and take another head, and work down again. And so on, through his capital speech."
LINCOLN GOES TO NEW ENGLAND.—A NEW SPEECH.
This speech, as well as the respect Lincoln's work in the House had inspired among the leaders of the party, brought him an invitation to deliver several campaign speeches in New England at the close of Congress, and he went there early in September. There was in New England, at that date, much strong anti-slavery feeling. The Whigs claimed to be "Free Soilers" as well as the party which appropriated that name, and Lincoln, in the first speech he made, defined carefully his position on the slavery question. This was at Worcester, Massachusetts, on September 12th. The Whig State convention had met to nominate a candidate for governor, and the most eminent Whigs of Massachusetts were present. Curiously enough the meeting was presided over by ex-Governor Levi Lincoln, a descendant, like Abraham Lincoln, from the original Samuel of Hingham. There were many brilliant speeches made; but if we are to trust the reports of the day, Lincoln's was the one which by its logic, its clearness, and its humor, did most for the Whig cause. "Gentlemen inform me," says one Boston reporter, who came too late for the exercises, "that it was one of the best speeches ever heard in Worcester, and that several Whigs who had gone off on the Free Soil fizzle have come back again to the Whig ranks."
A report was made and printed in the Boston "Advertiser," though it has hitherto been entirely overlooked by biographers of Lincoln. A search made for this magazine through the files of the Boston and Worcester papers of the year brought it to light, and we reprint it here for the first time. It gives concisely what Lincoln thought about the slavery question in 1848. The report reads:
"Mr. Lincoln has a very tall and thin figure, with an intellectual face, showing a searching mind and a cool judgment. He spoke in a clear and cool and very eloquent manner for an hour and a half, carrying the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations—only interrupted by warm and frequent applause. He began by expressing a real feeling of modesty in addressing an audience this 'side of the mountains,' a part of the country where, in the opinion of the people of his section, everybody was supposed to be instructed and wise. But he had devoted his attention to the question of the coming Presidential election, and was not unwilling to exchange with all whom he might the ideas to which he had arrived. He then began to show the fallacy of some of the arguments against General Taylor, making his chief theme the fashionable statement of all those who oppose him (the old Locofocos as well as the new), that he has no principles, and that the Whig party have abandoned their principles by adopting him as their candidate. He maintained that General Taylor occupied a high and unexceptionable Whig ground, and took for his first instance and proof of this his statement in the Allison letter—with regard to the Bank, Tariff, Rivers and Harbors, etc.—that the will of the people should produce its own results, without executive influence. The principle that the people should do what—under the Constitution—they please, is a Whig principle. All that, General Taylor not only consents to, but appeals to the people to judge and act for themselves. And this was no new doctrine for Whigs. It was the 'platform' on which they had fought all their battles, the resistance of executive influence, and the principle of enabling the people to frame the government according to their will. General Taylor consents to be the candidate, and to assist the people to do what they think to be their duty, and think to be best in their national affairs; but because he don't want to tell what we ought to do, he is accused of having no principles. The Whigs have maintained for years that neither the influence, the duress, nor the prohibition of the executive should control the legitimately expressed will of the people; and now that on that very ground General Taylor says that he should use the power given him by the people to do, to the best of his judgment, the will of the people, he is accused of want of principle and of inconsistency in position.
"Mr. Lincoln proceeded to examine the absurdity of an attempt to make a platform or creed for a national party, to all parts of which all must consent and agree, when it was clearly the intention and the true philosophy of our government, that in Congress all opinions and principles should be represented, and that when the wisdom of all had been compared and united, the will of the majority should be carried out. On this ground he conceived (and the audience seemed to go with him) that General Taylor held correct, sound republican principles.
From a photograph kindly loaned by Miss Frances M. Lincoln of Worcester, Massachusetts, after a painting by Chester Harding. Levi Lincoln was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1782, and died there in 1868. He was a fourth cousin of Thomas Lincoln, father of the President, being descended from the oldest son of Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, Massachusetts, from whose fourth son, Mordecai, Abraham Lincoln descended. Levi Lincoln was a graduate of Harvard, and studied law, practising in Worcester. He filled many important public positions in the State, serving in the legislature, and as lieutenant-governor, judge of the Supreme Court, and from 1825 to 1834 as governor. He represented the Whigs in Congress from 1835 to 1841, and after the expiration of his term was made collector of the port of Boston. Levi Lincoln was an active member of several learned societies, and prominent in all the public functions of his State. In 1848, when Abraham Lincoln, then member of Congress, spoke in Worcester, ex-Governor Lincoln presided.