Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific

2. Lincoln, the West, and the Antislavery Politics of the 1850s

 90 2 ➢ Lincoln, the West, and the Antislavery Politics of the 1850s Michael S. Green On February 27, 1860, a large crowd sat at New York City’s Cooper Union as William Cullen Bryant, the poet and Republican editor of the New York Evening Post, introduced that evening’s speaker. Bryant said, “The great West, my friends, is a potent auxiliary in the battle we are fighting, for Freedom against Slavery.” He added, “These children of the West, my friends, form a living bulwark against the advance of Slavery, and from them is recruited the vanguard of the armies of liberty. One of them will appear before you this evening in person,” and with that, he presented a politician and lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.1 That night, the audience heard what Harold Holzer has called “the speech that made Abraham Lincoln president.” Lincoln had spent weeks scouring historical and contemporary accounts of the Founding Fathers to prove their opposition to slavery—“As if,” Holzer wrote, “not only ‘the Cause,’ but his own political life, depended on it.” That may have been the case. Bryant and another Republican sitting on the platform, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, shared a distaste for Senator William Henry Seward, the front-runner for the party nomination, and they hoped to find another candidate. Compared with Seward, Lincoln had the advantages of political moderation, a reputation for probity, and, since he came from a swing state, geography. The question was whether he had the ability and the gravitas. That night, he abandoned the style of stump speech he had mastered back home to deliver a long, scholarly treatise in which he satisfied himself and his listeners that the Founding Fathers intended to avoid the spread of slavery into new territories—the issue on which Republicans had united. Lincoln’s ➢ Lincoln, the West, and Antislavery Politics 91 success at Cooper Union laid important groundwork for his nomination that spring and his election that November.2 While Lincoln struck his fellow Republicans favorably, he also struck them in another way. “The first impression of the man from the West did nothing to contradict the expectation of something weird, rough, and uncultivated ,” one observer remembered. Others commented on his personal appearance. Holzer explained, “Cooper Union gave Lincoln the opportunity to prove his universal appeal beyond the confines of the western frontier that produced him. It demonstrated to the entire eastern region, through newspaper reprints and subsequent personal appearances, that he was a serious, learned, dignified public figure, far more civilized than the prairie -bred storyteller who had mesmerized rowdy crowds on the debate trail in 1858.”3 At Cooper Union, New Yorkers encountered a different Lincoln from the one familiar in Illinois, but what Lincoln said that night represented not a break with the past, but a continuation of it. Lincoln was a child of the frontier , born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and matured in Illinois. There he married Mary Todd, a Kentucky native of higher social origins, who spent two decades trying to domesticate his relaxed, rustic manners, with mixed results. In his appearance, dress, speech patterns, and folksiness, Lincoln cut a far different figure from the politicians familiar to easterners. But in Illinois, with its more racist and frontier culture, Lincoln faced a different situation than his eastern counterparts—or, to put it more accurately, he had to face the same issues and opinions in different ways. As he once told a Massachusetts audience, Illinoisans opposed slavery just as much as they did, but people of his state “did not keep so constantly thinking about it.” Lincoln thought about it more and more as the issue became increasingly important nationally—and as settlement increased in the West. Living and working there, he understood the West’s importance to the nation’s future. In the years before he became president, he often expressed and demonstrated that importance and, in the process of trying to shape the West, revealed its importance in shaping him.4 The Western Whig From his political beginnings, as Lincoln sought to shape the West, the West was shaping him. His view of the West was partly what would become Frederick Jackson Turner’s West of equality and opportunity, which Lincoln exemplified in his rise from storekeeper to political leader, advocacy of  Michael S. Green 92 democratic ideals, and declaration in 1836 that “I go for admitting all whites to...