Lincoln's 1854 Visit

On November 1, 1854, an incensed Abraham Lincoln attacked the immorality of slavery in a speech at Kendall Hall after being stirred from a five-year political slumber by Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he opposed in a series of speeches in central Illinois in late 1854. Lincoln's Quincy friend Abraham Jonas invited him to address the Kansas-Nebraska question there on behalf of the congressional candidacy of Archibald Williams, predicting political benefit for him, and Lincoln accepted, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd while attacking slavery, former Quincyan Douglas, and the idea of popular sovereignty. Quincyans heard similar themes when Lincoln returned four years later to debate Douglas on October 13, 1858. Orrin Kendall's building on the southwest corner of Sixth and Maine, completed on October 5, 1852, was an impressive three-story brick structure with a cracker and confectionery business in the basement and a large public hall measuring 50 by 80 feet on the second floor. Meetings were held in Kendall Hall almost every evening in 1854 as politics reached a fever pitch, and speakers on the Nebraska question included James W. Singleton, Orville H. Browning, and Lincoln. Lincoln's appearance there in 1854 supported the congressional campaign of his longtime Quincy friend Archibald Williams. His political genius also appeared during the 1860 presidential primary campaign, when Abraham Jonas warned him that local Democrat Issac N. Morris was seeking affidavits from certain Irishmen that they had seen Lincoln come out of a Quincy Know-Nothing Lodge, a charge that could have cost him German and Irish votes if believed and Know-Nothing votes if directly denied. Lincoln replied that it must not publicly appear that he was paying any attention to the charge and suggested that Jonas obtain affidavits from respectable men who were always in the lodge and never saw him there, a ploy that worked and kept the matter from becoming public.

Quincy, Illinois · United States