Beschreibung:

LINCOLN, Abraham. Autograph letter signed ("A. Lincoln"), to Jediah F. Alexander (editor of the Greenville, Ill. Advocate ), Springfield, 15 May 1858. 2 pages, 4to, silked. . A KEY LETTER ANTICIPATING THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES: "THERE REMAINS ALL THE DIFFERENCE THERE EVER WAS BETWEEN JUDGE DOUGLAS & THE REPUBLICANS" ON WHETHER "TO KEEP SLAVERY OUT OF THE TERRITORIES" A superb political letter in which Lincoln looks forward to his campaign contest with Stephen A. Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat (a local contest made memorable by their historic debates). Here, Lincoln forcefully emphasizes the stark differences between them on the central issue of slavery. Lincoln, interestingly, is cautious about starting his campaign too early, as he pleads the need to tend his law practice, declining Alexander's invitation to speak at a Bond county political meeting: "It is too early," he writes, "considering that when I once begin making political speeches I shall have no respite till November. The labor of that I might endure, but I really can not spare the time from my business." Then Lincoln spells out the irreconcilable divergence between his and Douglas's positions: "...There remains all the difference there ever was between Judge Douglas & the Republicans," he says, " they insisting that Congress shall , and he insisting that Congress shall not , keep slavery out of the Territories before & up to the time they form state constitutions. No republican has ever contended that, when a constitution is to be formed, any but the people of the territory shall form it. Republicans have never contended that congress should dictate a constitution to any state or territory; but they have contended that the people should be perfectly free to form their constitution in their own way as perfectly free from the presence of slavery amongst them, as from every other improper influence. In voting together in opposition to a constitution being forced upon the people of Kansas, neither Judge Douglas nor the republicans, has conceded anything which was ever in dispute between them." Lincoln succintly and unerringly gets at the heart of the dispute tearing American politics apart, a conflict triggered when Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act into the Senate in 1854. Before then, slavery had been barred from the territories north of the Missouri Compromise line. Douglas's bill called for allowing the citizens of those territories to exercise popular sovereignty and vote for whether they wanted slavery or not. The result was chaos. Violent clashes ensued, particularly in Kansas, as outsiders flooded in to vote their side of the issue. Rival state governments and state constitutions arose in Topeka and Lecompton. Douglas's bill outraged anti-slavery forces and helped give birth to the new Republican Party in 1856. Lincoln's active involvement in national affairs dates from the Kansas-Nebraska battles. For him and other Republicans the emerging states in the western territories had to be preserved as bastions of free labor, places where ordinary people from humble origins (like Lincoln himself) could achieve economic independence and prosperity. The "improper influence" of slavery, as Lincoln notes here, would only poison the economic and moral climate of the west the way it had done in the South. The slave states were all stagnant and backward, their statehouses and courts dominated by the wealthy slave-owning planters. Fighting to prevent that drove Lincoln to get into politics, and it became the central point of contention in the debates with Douglas during the 1858 campaign. Published in Basler, 5:446-447.