The provisions of the Whig Party’s American System highlighted tensions between those who believed in states’ rights and those who believed in the new nationalism. An 1830 bill introduced by Democratic Senator Robert Y. Haynes to restrict sales of western lands led to his memorable debate with Whig leader Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Hayne argued that the Union was a compact between independent states, who could choose to withdraw. Webster protested that the people of the U.S. had established the Constitution and that its laws bind the states in a perpetual union. He memorably asserted that only the collective nation could protect personal freedoms. Abraham Lincoln would later draw on this speech in his first inaugural address, delivered after seven southern states had left the Union.
Lincoln idolized U.S. Senator Henry Clay (Whig Party, Kentucky) and supported his ideas for economic modernization, which Clay called the American System. This system included tariffs to protect American industry and agriculture, sales of public land to provide funding, infrastructure spending to improve transportation, and a national bank to provide a stable currency. Between 1816 and 1828, Congress enacted programs in each of these areas. Southerners objected in particular to the tariffs, which they felt benefited only other regions. In response, Clay delivered his widely lauded Defence of the American System speech over three days to a packed chamber. He attacked the opposing Democrats’ emphasis on limited government and sectional autonomy with a compelling argument for protective tariffs.
The Illinois Republican Party selected Lincoln to run against Democrat Stephen Douglas in the 1858 U.S. Senate election. The printing above is of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech from the nominating convention in which he asserted that voters must choose between supporting or opposing slavery—there could be no middle ground. He memorably argued, “[T]his government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing or all the other.” This speech convinced Frederick Douglass that Lincoln might be capable of uniting “all the moral and political forces” opposing slavery.
