Browse Items (13 total)

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  The Fugitive Slave Law, and Its Victims.

  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave enslavers more power and threatened the liberty and safety of all Black persons living in free states. It denied the right to a trial by jury to those accused of being fugitives and required the U.S. government and private citizens to actively assist enslavers in capturing Black people accused of being fugitives, even on free lands. The above abolitionist pamphlet from 1856 provides a thirty-page list of those who had escaped from and then been returned to the South, along with a ten-page account of Margaret Garner, a fugitive who killed her daughter to prevent the baby from being enslaved. Lincoln consistently upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave laws, but he reproached the lack of due process for the fugitives in the 1850 Act.

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  Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life.

  Returning to Illinois, Lincoln immersed himself in a career as an attorney. He built a successful legal practice with William Herndon, whose biography of Lincoln remains a principal source for historians. Studying for the state bar instilled in Lincoln a habit of careful personal study, and he developed the ability to frame complex legal issues in plain terms. Unlike some other attorneys, including his partner, Lincoln did not volunteer to provide free legal services for fugitives from slavery. He did represent a small number of paying Black clients.

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  General Taylor and the Wilmot Proviso.

  In 1846, when Congressman Lincoln was sworn in, the United States was again expanding. The Republic of Texas had just joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state, and the U.S. had its eyes on Mexican territory, hoping to take California and the land in between. The expansionist president James Polk initiated a war with Mexico, claiming that Mexico attacked first. Lincoln fell in line with the Whig Party, condemning the rationale for the Mexican-American War and endorsing the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in any territories acquired from Mexico. As the above propaganda pamphlet explains, the proviso did not pass. But the Wilmot Proviso foregrounded slavery as the central issue and increased the divide between the South and the North. Lincoln’s opposition to the war made him politically unpopular in Illinois. He did not run for reelection.

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  Congressional Directory, For the Second Session of the Thirtieth Congress.

  Lincoln sought and finally won a Congressional seat in 1846, when he was elected to represent Illinois. At this point, he had established a general reputation as being opposed to slavery, but he had not yet been forced to clarify his views. The Congressional Directory indicates that Lincoln was lodging in Washington at Mrs. Sprigg’s boarding house, near the intersection of First Street and Independence Avenue.

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  "Speech of Daniel Webster, in Reply to Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina."

  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.

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  "Speech of Henry Clay, In Defence of the American System."

  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.

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  Reports from the Joint Select Committee to Enquire into The Condition Of The State Bank Of Illinois.

  In 1834, at the age of twenty-five, Lincoln was elected to the first of four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives. The Illinois House report shown here marks the third appearance of his name in print. By 1836, Lincoln was an acknowledged leader within the Whig Party. He was a member of the younger generation of Whigs who sought to expand voting rights and who believed they could compete with Democrats for the votes of the common man. Lincoln, himself from an impoverished background, took this further than most, favoring voting rights for all property-owning white people “who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).” In doing so, he accepted the legitimacy of a racial barrier to political participation.

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  Complete Historical, Chronological, and Geographical American Atlas.

  At the time of its publication, Carey’s American Atlas was the most detailed atlas to be produced in the United States. It includes individual color maps of each state and a map depicting the West by Stephen H. Long. Substantial historical background text accompanies each map. Fielding Lucas, the prominent Baltimore printer, was the principal engraver. By 1822, Indiana and Illinois had become states. The large Missouri Territory and smaller “Arkansa” Territory (both part of the Louisiana Purchase) are visible to the West. Texas would not become a sovereign republic until 1836.

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  Treaty Between the United States of America and the Confederated Tribes of Sac & Fox Indians.

  In the 1830s, Lincoln’s ambitions for leadership became apparent. He took a job as a clerk in a general store, gaining access to newspapers and current news and distance from strenuous labor. He began reading history books and attending debate society meetings. In March of 1832, he ran in but lost an election for state legislator. A month later, he joined the Illinois Militia mustering to confront a party of Sauk, Fox and Kickapoo men, women and children seeking to return to their homeland in defiance of an invalid treaty. Lincoln did not see combat, but he was elected company captain. Outside of his presidency, he called this “a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”

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  Connected View of the Whole Internal Navigation of the United States.

  Lincoln’s adolescence was spent in Indiana. He later wrote that he had received less than a year’s schooling there—total. He was raised doing physical labor. He cleared trees for the family’s farm and was later employed to ferry flatboats of farm harvest down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Poor roads in the West made river access indispensable, as Armroyd’s navigational map shows. On these trips and others, Lincoln encountered large slave markets, as well as the vibrant Black culture in New Orleans.

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  A Guide for Emigrants Containing Sketches of Illinois, Missouri, and the Adjacent Parts.

  In Lincoln’s telling, another reason for his family’s move to Indiana was their repudiation of slavery. His immediate family opposed slavery but were not part of the abolition movement. The appeal of a free state was as likely practical as moral. Farmers like Thomas Lincoln could not compete financially with plantation owners who had an enslaved workforce. Throughout his life, Lincoln connected free labor with “a fair chance, in the race of life.” The federal government encouraged white Americans and recent immigrants from other countries to populate the new states in what is now the Midwest. Guides such as the one seen here promoted this emigration. This one was published the year after the Lincoln family migrated from Indiana to Illinois.

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  Act for Granting Lands to the Inhabitants and Settlers at Vincennes and the Illinois County.

  In 1816, when Lincoln was seven, his family moved to Indiana, then a brand-new state. The Land Grant Act above had helped prepare the territory, originally part of the Old Northwest Territory, for entry into the United States. Indiana remained a borderland where the U.S. North and South overlapped and flowed together, and where Native Americans, French citizens, English citizens, and Americans intermingled. The War of 1812 had been followed by forty years of forced relocation of the defeated Wyandotte, Piankashaw, Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Wea, and Potawatomi tribes. Lincoln’s father was able to buy land cheaply from the U.S. government through a system developed by Thomas Jefferson. The land sales provided revenue to alleviate Revolutionary War debts and created communities organized into neat grids.

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  The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke.

  Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in a one-room log cabin in the woods of Kentucky. By then, the United States had expanded to seventeen states, and Kentucky was one of the westernmost. Its territory had originally been a part of Virginia, and it remained a slave state. Shown above is the first book on Kentucky, by John Filson, which introduced the story of frontiersman Daniel Boone. Lincoln’s grandfather and namesake, Abraham (1744-1786), followed Boone to Kentucky looking for land to farm. Lincoln’s parents, Thomas and Nancy, were hardscrabble farmers who moved their family several times in search of better opportunities, but the family never escaped poverty.

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