170 years ago: Lincoln’s Peoria Speech

Long before his likeness towered over Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln, an obscure, outdoorsy lawyer who cut his teeth on the uncultured American frontier, stumped for a congressional seat in the Sucker State.

Lincoln understood better than anyone that his unremarkable background did not set the stage for future greatness.

“It is great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life,” the future president once wrote. “It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in [Thomas] Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life and that’s all you or anyone else can make out of it.”

When asked by Jesse Fell, a Republican acquaintance, to write a short biography about himself, Lincoln skipped self-aggrandizement.

“I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky,” he recounted. “Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity. … If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on an average one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes — no other marks or brands recollected.”

“There is not much of it,” he sheepishly confessed to Fell, “for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.”

But tucked within that endearingly diffident descriptor, we find a second noteworthy avowal: “I was losing interest in politics,” Lincoln admitted, “when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.”

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise at the hands of the Kansas-Nebraska Act facilitated the expansion of slavery beyond the previously defined borders. Lincoln, an abolitionist at heart, was mortified. The act, he said, “was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”

There may not have been “much of [him]” to offer — the short and simple annals of the poor may have restricted him —  but the lawyer could not sit idly by. He refused to fall silent about what he knew to be evil.

On October 16, 1854, 170 years ago today, Lincoln assailed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in one of his most important speeches, the Peoria Speech. At the time, he was running for office against the bill’s sponsor, Stephen A. Douglas, who had accused Lincoln and his allies of a chaotic, divided response to the repeal of their beloved Compromise.

“We were thunderstruck and stunned,” Lincoln conceded, “and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach — a scythe — a pitchfork — chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him.”

“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate,” he tore into Douglas. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty — criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

Historians credit Lincoln’s Peoria Speech with setting him on the path to the presidency. At three hours long, the speech forcefully unmasked the logical fallacies at the heart of American slavery. “If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say he too shall not govern himself?” the future Great Emancipator asked. “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism.” Such rhetoric garnered the attention of the newly formed Republican Party.

Men like Lincoln aren’t supposed to become president. But his story — and the Peoria Speech, in particular — remind us of what can happen when one man dares to do his duty.

In the end, he may have lost his race to Douglas. But the all-American chronicles of Abraham Lincoln were only just beginning.