Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point
By Lewis E. Lehrman
(Stackpole Books, 412 pages, $29.95)
The first Lincoln-Douglas debates. The turning point. The
political catalyst. The Peoria speech. These are some of the terms
used to describe Abraham Lincoln's return to politics in 1854 after
a five-year hiatus. It was a seminal turning point in American
history, centered on, not surprisingly, slavery, and whether or not
the future of the country would be ruled by the Slave Power. It was
in this year that U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska
Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened the western
United States to the institution of human bondage. It was a moral
outrage to Springfield lawyer and former Congressman Abraham
Lincoln, and one that "aroused him as he had never been before."
Lincoln's opposition to the Act and to the spread—even the
government sanctioning—of slavery in the U.S. territories
ultimately transformed him from a provincial, regional party
politician to a national statesman. It is this transformation that
Lewis E. Lehrman examines and explains in his book, Lincoln at
Peoria: The Turning Point, a work that, likes its subject,
will become indispensable to any study of Abraham Lincoln.
"To understand President Abraham Lincoln, one must understand
the Peoria speech of October 16, 1854," Lehrman writes. "It forms
the foundation of his politics and principles, in the 1850s and in
his presidency."
The speech was, in fact, an extended, encore performance of a
speech two weeks earlier in Springfield, made as a response to Sen.
Douglas's promulgation of "popular sovereignty" in the Kansas and
Nebraska Territories. It was the beginning of a series of debates
between Lincoln and Douglas—a prelude to their great 1858
debates—that ranged over the state of Illinois and ended, like the
later debates, with Lincoln's loss of the Illinois senatorship.
Lincoln at Peoria is the first detailed
examination of Lincoln's Peoria speech: its context, its rhetoric,
and its consequences, and how it began Lincoln's preparation for
the presidency.
Lincoln was against slavery, but he was not an abolitionist. He
did not believe in the complete extirpation of slavery from
America—either as a political or even a practical action. He
believed the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it
already existed, but that the Founders intended its containment in
those states as a course to its ultimate extinction. In his Peoria
speech, Lincoln outlined with the thoroughness and exactness of a
trained historian the history of debate over the slavery issue, and
exactly how and when the country's Founders showed themselves
averse to slavery's expansion and even its existence. For Douglas
to institute the "popular sovereignty" doctrine and to say it did
not matter to him—and should not matter to anyone—how each state
decided its own laws regarding slavery, was to Lincoln a dangerous
and deceitful political ploy.
"This declared indifference, but as I must think,
covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but
hate," Lincoln said. "I hate it because of the monstrous injustice
of slavery itself. I hate because it deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of
free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—
causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and
especially because it forces so many really good men amongst
ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of
civil liberty criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and
insisting that there is no right principle of action but
self-interest."
To open up the country to slavery was not only directly against
the historical evidence of the Founders' beliefs and intentions,
Lincoln believed, but would eventually destroy the Union
itself.
LINCOLN'S POLITICAL LIFE up until 1854 had been typical, and
provincial. He voted and fought along party lines, and focused his
time and energies on local and regional issues. "The
Springfield-Peoria speeches marked Lincoln's decisive shift from
the issue of economic growth— free markets, property rights, and
nationalist economics— to the principles of the Declaration of
Independence and the struggle for a republican Constitution,"
Lehrman states. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise put Lincoln
on a moral crusade to prevent the expansion of slavery. It was not
just morally wrong to the African slaves, but it also was offensive
and hypocritical of a country based on freedom to utilize and
support human bondage. "Our Republican robe is soiled, and trailed
in the dust. Let us repurify it," Lincoln said at Peoria. "Let us
turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the
Revolution." Lincoln's speech is a refutation of Douglas's
assertions of slaves as property, of popular sovereignty as
legitimate, and of the general moral equivocation by
politicians.
As Lehrman deftly explains, the Peoria speech made Lincoln the
central anti-Nebraska political figure in Illinois. It enhanced his
reputation and focused his mind and philosophy on the great moral
issue of the day, which he saw as a direct threat to American
democracy and freedom. It also was the foundation of later moments
in his political ascendancy such as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in
1858, the Cooper Union Speech in 1860, and many of Lincoln's ideas
and policies regarding slavery as president. Lincoln's 1854 rise
not only propelled him upward, but also knocked Stephen Douglas
backward and off balance on his meteoric ascension to what everyone
assumed was his eventual presidency. "On these two occasions [in
Springfield and Peoria], perhaps more than any other in his
life...Douglas [was] disconcerted by the vigor and power of the
reply to him," wrote Lincoln's friend and eventual biographer Isaac
Arnold. "It was perfectly clear that Mr. Lincoln spoke from the
most deep and earnest conviction of right, and his manner indicated
this."
Lehrman's examination of Lincoln's Peoria speech and the events
surrounding it is a missing piece in the vast puzzle of Lincoln
scholarship. Scholars and historians have noted the importance of
this speech, but have never given it the full attention or study it
deserves. Lehrman, a businessman and co-founder of the
Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, spent twenty years on
this book, and it shows. He explains the speech without being
pedantic; he steeps the reader in its context without being
repetitive or soporific. What he offers is a thought-provoking
analysis of Lincoln as political phoenix, rising anew from the
ashes of his near political surrender. Lincoln at Peoria
also includes the full text of the speech, significant milestones
in the lives of Lincoln and Douglas, and even a chapter on "The
Peoria Speech and the Historians' Record," showing what has and has
not previously been said about it.
Lincoln at Peoria is an indispensable study on
Lincoln's rise to greatness. It is fascinating and revelatory, and
imbued with the care of a historian with a deep respect and
reverence for—and adherence to— the historical record. One cannot
imagine this book being improved upon.
