Becoming Lincoln

A rift between Stephen Douglas and President James Buchanan appeared to give Abraham Lincoln a break in his run for U.S. Senate. But Lincoln began scrambling to pull Republicans behind him after Douglas started flirting with a bipartisan anti-Buchanan coalition. Sources used:"A Bad Sign." Illinois State Journal, April 14, 1858, p. 2 Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 2019. Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. (Vol. 1). The John Hopkins University Pr...

The Scott family's decade-long fight to claim the freedom owed to them under the law ran into state and federal judges determined to close the courts -- and broader citizenship -- to Black Americans. For white Americans like Abraham Lincoln, the Dred Scott ruling forced them to consider how denial of rights to one group of people could leave everyone else's rights open to question. Sources used: Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 2019. ...

The 1856 presidential election took place amid a backdrop of violence in Kansas and Congress. Abraham Lincoln threw himself into the fight for the Republican Party and free territories. Sources used:"1856 Democratic Party Platform," hosted on the University of California Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project.Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 2019.Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. (Vol. 1). The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.Collected Works...

As the Whig Party withered away in 1855, Abraham Lincoln found himself pulled toward the new Republican Party -- an organization that not only stood foursquare against slavery's expansion, but brought an economic vision that reflected northern attitudes and explicitly rejected the Southern way of life. Sources used:Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 2019.Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. (Vol. 1). The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.Collected Work...

Being an enslaved person in America in the 1850s meant the ever-present threat of violence and separation from loved ones. And throughout the decade, the white South became increasingly determined to spread it as far as they could. Sources for this episode: Berlin, Ira and Rowland, Leslie, ed. Families and Freedom: A Documetary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era. The New Press; 1997.Berlin, Ira, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Belkna...

The Kansas-Nebraska Act threw American politics into chaos in 1854. The two-party duopoly that existed for the previous 20 years was swept away in the space of a few months. As Abraham Lincoln fought for the anti-Nebraska coalition in Illinois, he found himself with an unexpected political opportunity -- followed by the most difficult decision of his career to that point.

Nursing his own ambitions and trying to hold onto his power in the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas agreed to introduce legislation repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the upper Midwest to slavery. The brazen assault by pro-slavery forces upended the nation's party system and brought Abraham Lincoln to the forefront of the forces opposing Douglas and defending the Declaration of Independence.

Abraham Lincoln would never had become president had he not locked horns with Stephen Douglas, whose rapid rise through Illinois politics quickly made him a national icon. Douglas' life had some parallels to Lincoln's, and in many ways, his attraction to money and flexible policy better embodied the America of the early 1850s than the old parties did.

Abraham Lincoln's racial attitudes were complicated. He was willing to defend fugitive slaves and appears to have lived in what was (for its time) an integrated neighborhood. But he also defended a slaveholder in court, and advocated for schemes to persuade African-Americans to leave the land of their birth.

Abraham Lincoln's law practice was dominated by debt cases and the messy but commonplace disputes that make up a legal practice then and now. He plied his trade throughout central Illinois and was a popular companion for other attorneys in his field. But was he a good lawyer?

Mary Lincoln's domestic life often involved working as a single parent and managing tight finances while her husband was out making a living. Both parents were devoted to their children, and faced devastation when their son Eddie became sick in late 1849. Less than a year later, Abraham Lincoln made a fateful choice when he received word that his father Thomas was ill.

As he returned for the final congressional session of his term, Abraham Lincoln tried to lay the groundwork for the future of his party -- by proposing the abolition of slavery within the District of Columbia, and in using the patronage powers of the newly elected Whig president. But opposing forces, and Lincoln's underestimation of them, led to disappointment.

The Whigs were desperate for victory in 1848, and Abraham Lincoln joined a group promoting the candidacy of General Zachary Taylor. Lincoln showed that he could be an effective speaker -- but he could not have foreseen that his efforts would help destroy the party that he had devoted his life to.

The U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846 sparked a humanitarian catastrophe that had profound consequences for both countries. Abraham Lincoln joined a Whig fight against the war.

As Abraham Lincoln moved to secure the Whig nomination for Congress in 1846, he had to confront the ambitions of an old friend for the seat, and the growing power of the abolitionists within his district.

By 1842, Abraham Lincoln had completed a long and painful journey into the middle class. He was an established attorney and had married into a prominent family. But politics would force him to reckon with the costs of his decisions -- and later, confront a grief he had never left behind.

As Abraham Lincoln recovered from his nervous breakdown, he further focused on ways to allow his head to control his heart. Yet as 1842 unfolded, he found himself in a potentially deadly fight with a political rival, and growing closer to Mary Todd.

His personal and professional bonds all snapped at once at the end of 1840. It proved a prelude to the worst emotional crisis of Lincoln's life, one that he would need a full year to pull himself out of.

With the Whig Party appearing poised for a major breakthrough in 1840, Abraham Lincoln campaigned hard, showing a desperation that led him to attack individuals and fall back on the shameful race-baiting that defined his youth. Toward the end of the year, he became involved with a young woman in Springfield, named Mary Todd.

As an economic depression hardened party lines, Abraham Lincoln became an enthusiastic Whig partisan, fighting hard to get his law partner into Congress. During the contest, the lynching of a black man and the later murder of a newspaper editor led him to deliver his first notable public address.