In 1855, the Whig Party had all but fallen apart. Always a Whig in politics, Lincoln was deciding whether to join the new Republican Party. The American Party, called the Know-Nothings because of their habit of denying any knowledge if asked about the party, had also been making inroads with a platform based on bigotry toward foreigners and Catholics (often Irish immigrants). In a letter written August 24, 1855, he tells his longtime friend Joshua Speed that “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is Certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favoring of degrading classes of white people?”
The letter to Speed covers a lot of ground and I encourage people to read the entire letter. In it he gently chastises his most intimate male friend, who has returned to his native Kentucky to get married and run the family plantation, complete with enslaved workers. The issue of Kansas entering the Union as a free state was a hot topic at the time, and Lincoln calls out Speed on his actions not matching his rhetoric:
You say if Kansas fairly votes herself a free state, as a Christian you will rather rejoice at it. All decent slaveholders talk that way; and I do not doubt their candor. But they never vote that way. Although in a private letter, or conversation, you will express your preference that Kansas shall be free, you would vote for no man for Congress who would say the same thing publicly. No such man could be elected from any district in any slave-state.
In other words, slaveholders who claim to believe in liberty don’t back up their claims.
Responding to Speed’s query as to where Lincoln himself stands on the issues, Lincoln responds with:
I think I am a Whig; but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of anyone attempting to unWhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.
After reiterating that he was not a Know-Nothing, Lincoln laments the state of our democracy:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln does, of course, join the new Republican Party, which is made up of antislavery Whigs and likeminded Democrats, Free-Soilers, Liberty Party, and even the segment of Know-Nothings who are antislavery. The Republican focus is on keeping slavery out of the western territories (and eventually the District of Columbia), acknowledging that the Constitution does not provide the authority for federal abolition of slavery in the states in which it already existed. Lincoln had been reelected to the Illinois state legislature in 1854 without his consent, and refused to accept so he could run for Senate. Almost winning the seat (state legislature politics kept him out), he then received 110 votes for the 1856 vice presidential nomination, losing out to William Dayton. In 1858 he ran as a Republican against old rival Stephen A. Douglas for the other Senate seat, again losing out to legislative politics despite the Republicans winning the popular vote in the state. In 1860, Lincoln beat Douglas and two other candidates to become our 16th president. And the war came.
[Photo: Wikimedia Commons]
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
