By REG ANKROM Locals throughout the region like to think that Abraham Lincoln, Whig and Republican, lawyer, and two-time opponent of Quincyan Stephen A. Douglas for national political offices, was a frequent visitor. It's little wonder that people of Central Illinois, where the Great Emancipator and martyred president had spent 29 years of his life, would want to claim some special connection to him. Lincoln on several occasions was a correspondent, fellow legislator and often a law practitioner in Springfield courts with a considerable number of Quincy men. But "The Lincoln Log," the authoritative daily chronology of Lincoln's activities, shows that his size 14 boots plodded the streets of Quincy on only two occasions. He took trains through the community at least four times, but his destinations were in Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
Lincoln stayed in Quincy two nights in late 1854. He was in town to make the last in a series of speeches against the explosive Kansas-Nebraska Act, which two Quincyans sponsored that year -- Stephen A. Douglas in the Senate and William Richardson in the House. At the request of lawyer Abraham Jonas of Quincy, Lincoln was here to boost the candidacy of Quincy friend and fellow lawyer Archibald Williams, a man more ungainly and even more unattractive than Lincoln. Williams was opposing Richardson for the Fifth Congressional District seat. Lincoln spoke that evening to a crowd packed onto the second floor of Kendall's Hall at Sixth and Maine. Orrin Kendall had built the mansard-roofed, three-story brick building in 1850 to house his confectionary business on the first floor and host large assemblies on the second. Lincoln's appeal that night did nothing to boost Williams, who a few days later lost to Richardson. But it helped revive Lincoln's own long-dormant political career. Never effusive in praise of any speech Lincoln made, Quincy lawyer Orville Browning gave lean notice in his diary to this one. Lincoln had arrived the night before, Browning wrote. He dined and took tea and "addressed the people at Kendall's Hall on the Nebraska question." Local newspapers were hardly any more restrained. The Democratically oriented Quincy Herald did not give Lincoln's speech any notice at all. And the Quincy Daily Whig on Nov. 3 ran two full columns on Page 2 condemning Douglas and Kansas-Nebraska. The paper devoted only 130 words in two paragraphs to "Mr. Lincoln's Speech." Lincoln's Quincy talk repeated the one he had given in Peoria two weeks earlier. The speech has been featured in books. Historian Lewis Lehrman in "Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point" summarizes it as the decisive discussion of Lincoln's developing insights on slavery and the beginning of his rise to greatness. Quincy journalists apparently considered it a yawner. Lincoln's better known visit was on Oct. 13, 1858, when he debated Douglas during their contest for Douglas' U.S. Senate seat. Lincoln had arrived on the train from Macomb that morning. Some 12,000 people joined him in Washington Park that afternoon to hear him debate Douglas. Quincy was the sixth site of seven debates in Illinois' nine congressional districts. (Douglas and Lincoln had already debated in Chicago and Springfield.) They would finish in Alton two days after their forensics in Quincy. Between Aug. 21 and Oct. 15, they would travel some 1,400 miles across Illinois. Having given dozens of other speeches, some over three hours long, both men at Quincy were exhausted. Lincoln spoke first, which gave Douglas one more hour to rest. Douglas' slurred speech as he began his 90-minute retort, however, led some to conclude that he was intoxicated. Each of the debates focused on a single issue -- the expansion of slavery -- which from the nation's founding had rent its republican robe ragged. It was an issue so capable of denying Americans a Union that the Founders wrote it into the Constitution in 1787. As George Washington, chairman of the constitutional convention, explained to a friend, "I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at this time." Douglas and Lincoln disagreed at Quincy on what the Founders intended in their compromise over slavery. Lincoln believed they thought slavery would be gradually eliminated, that it had been set on a course of ultimate extinction. Douglas did not disagree that slavery would end. He believed, however, that in a democracy the means were as important as the end. His argument was with Lincoln's notion that morality should trump the will of the people in stopping slavery's spread. Having converted his party to the idea of popular sovereignty -- the 1856 Democratic Platform made popular sovereignty its shining plank, Douglas argued that voters of a locality should decide for themselves their institutions, including slavery. Such an argument to Lincoln was an explicit denial of the humanity of blacks. It was at Quincy that Lincoln answered such reasoning with what is likely his most profound response at any of the debates. Lincoln said, "When Judge Douglas says that whoever or whatever community wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong... . If it be a wrong, he cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as down." Between Peoria and Quincy over those four years, Lincoln perfected his argument. In it, he exposed the flaw in Douglas's popular sovereignty as the means to resolving the crisis between North and South. Over the many miles he had traveled since his first visit to Quincy in 1854, Lincoln at Quincy on that Wednesday in 1858 had perfected an elegant argument: No vote could make a wrong right. Reg Ankrom is a member of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County and a local historian. He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of a history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War history
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