McLean County Museum of History Librarian Bill Kemp admits the legend of Abraham Lincoln has blossomed nearly into “cliché.”
A new exhibit at the downtown Bloomington museum attempts to plumb the truth behind the legend of the Great Emancipator. “Abraham Lincoln in McLean County” examines Lincoln’s work as an attorney in McLean County and on the Illinois Eighth Judicial Circuit, clarifies the circumstances of his nomination for president in 1860, explores the lasting connections Lincoln made with the people of this community, and defines his pivotal role in the anti-slavery movement and the formation of the new Republican Party in Illinois.
Kemp, co-curator of the recently opened permanent exhibit, cites Lincoln’s early “moral leadership” in attempting to at least curb slavery while striving to keep the nation intact. Even in the mid-1800s, as a slave-based economy dominated the South, the country was embroiled in contentious debate about “race and inequality and the role of African-Americans in American society,” he related.
Lincoln became an outspoken opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which proposed allowing settlers to expand slavery into northern territories. In a September 1854 speech in Bloomington, the future president argued “there is a vast difference between tolerating slavery in the original slave states. . .and extending slavery over a territory already free and uncontaminated with the institution.”
By today’s standards, that may seem equivocal, but Lincoln, unlike his Democrat opponents, was frank in declaring slavery a “moral, social, and political evil” incompatible with American principles and advocating basic human rights for blacks. The following year, the attorney told a Kentucky slaveholder the Kansas-Nebraska Act was “conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.” Indeed, violence erupted between pro- and anti-slavery interests in Kansas.
“Certainly, for some people, the anti-slavery movement was about economics, but it was also a moral debate or argument at least among some people, and not only among abolitionists,” Kemp noted. “People like Abraham Lincoln, who was certainly not an abolitionist in the 1950s, found the institution of slavery morally repugnant and fought to curtail slavery’s extension or expansion. He sought to limit it to where it was, hoping that sooner or later it would eventually wither and die on the vine.”
In an 1856 address, Lincoln pledged to oppose the slavery’s expansion, even proposing use of force if Southern “disunionists” followed through on their threat to secede from the Union. He was greeted with a standing ovation, but opinions on slavery and efforts to end the institution varied significantly across Central Illinois. Jesse Fell, Lincoln’s political ally and first attorney in the then-new county seat of Bloomington, avidly supported the abolitionist movement, while state judge and longtime Bloomingtonian David Davis called the abolitionist Harper’s Ferry armory raid in West Virginia a “dreadful affair” and those involved “wild fanatics.”
As Lincoln’s original party, the Whigs, crumbled, the Republican Party emerged with a primary goal of halting slavery’s spread into the territories. During the statewide Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1958, Democrat U.S. Senate incumbent Stephen Douglas attacked Republican challenger Lincoln for his support of equal rights and citizenship for African-Americans, warning voters they would “cover your prairies with black settlements.” Douglas maintained the authors of the Declaration of Independence “were speaking only of the white race,” and declared “I do not consider the negro any kin to me, nor to any other white man.”
Kemp stressed that Illinois at that juncture was “a very important state,” highly influential in the northern slavery debate. The Lincoln-Douglas speeches were “laced with discussions not only of slavery but race.”
“We tend to forget how racist and nasty and ugly Stephen Douglas and his party were and how refreshing Lincoln’s view was not only toward opposing slavery but in being willing to acknowledge the humanity not only of Africans freed, but slaves as well,” Kemp said.
