The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

The slavery issue was becoming dominant. Lincoln was not at the outset an abolitionist, and was unwilling to be placed in a position where he would be compelled to imperil his political chances by taking too definite a stand on this divisive measure; but on March 3, 1837, he introduced into the Legislature a vigorous protest against the aggressions of the pro-slavery party, a protest which probably failed to affect his political future because it contained only one signature beside his own. Only a few months later occurred the martyrdom of Owen Lovejoy at Alton, and the slavery issue was no longer one to be kept in the background. It is good to be able to remember that Lincoln's first protest against it was recorded before it had become so burning an issue. He himself dated his hostility to slavery to what he saw of a slave market in New Orleans when he visited that city as a boat hand. But he was unable to remember a time when he had not believed that slavery was wrong.

On other moral questions he now began to speak. He delivered an address on Temperance on Washington's Birthday in 1842. His first notable oratorical flight outside the spheres of politics and law was delivered before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on January 27, 1837, and was on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions." It took him longer to say it than it did at Gettysburg, and it was not so well said, but the rather florid lecture was intended to mean essentially the same thing which he later expressed much more simply and effectively.

His most important case that had a bearing on the slavery issue was that of Bailey vs. Cromwell, when he was thirty-two years of age. In preparing to argue before the Supreme Court of Illinois in favor of the freedom of a slave girl, he learned the legal aspects of the question which later he was to decide on its military and ethical character.

In 1858 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, and conducted that series of debates which made him known throughout the nation as the champion of freedom in the territories, and of the faith that the nation could not forever endure half slave and half free. In the autumn of 1859 he visited Kansas, and was hailed as the friend of freedom.

On Tuesday evening, February 27, 1860, he delivered an address in Cooper Union in New York City, an address which greatly extended his fame. On the preceding Sunday he attended Plymouth Church and heard and met Henry Ward Beecher.

On May 16, 1860, he was nominated for the Presidency of the United States by a great convention meeting in a temporary structure known as "the Wigwam" standing on Lake and Market Streets near the junction of the two branches of Chicago River. On November 7, 1860, he was elected President.

On Friday, November 4, 1842, he was married to Miss Mary Todd. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky, December 13, 1818, and had come to Springfield to be with her sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards, in whose home the marriage occurred. Concerning this marriage and the events which went before and after, much has been written and nothing need here be repeated.

When Lincoln arrived in Springfield, he found himself for the first time in his life living in a town with churches that held service every Sunday, and each church under the care of its own minister. Springfield had several churches, and he did not at first attend any of them. This does not seem to have been on account of any hostility which he entertained toward them, but his first months in Springfield were months of great loneliness and depression. He was keenly conscious of his poverty and of his social disqualifications. He was still tortured by his unhappy love affair with Mary Owens. More than a year after his arrival in Springfield he wrote to her that he had not yet attended church and giving as the reason that he would not know how to behave himself:

"This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business, after all; at least, it is so to me. I am quite as lonesome here as I ever was anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by but one woman since I have been here, and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it. I have never been to church yet, nor probably shall not be soon. I stay away because I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself. I am often thinking about what we said of your coming to live at Springfield. I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing it. You would have to be poor, without the means of hiding your poverty."