In the summer of 1856, Abraham Lincoln traveled across much of Illinois giving speeches in support of the new Republican Party and its national and state candidates. On August 9, 1856, he arrived in Shelbyville to debate Samuel Moulton and Anthony Thornton. Moulton was emerging as a strong Democratic voice in the Illinois House of Representatives, and Thornton, once a Whig like Lincoln, had become a Democrat after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. In Shelby County, long a Democratic stronghold, Lincoln stood for a small Republican minority, saying that “however poorly I may defend my cause, I can hardly harm it, if I do it no good.” His swing through Democratic counties, including Shelby, was his first as a prominent Republican, and Illinois Republicans recognized him as their party leader. His debates against slavery brought him notice beyond Illinois, and at the 1856 national Republican Convention he received a handful of votes for the vice presidential nomination. Robert Root, born in 1863 and dying in 1937, later sought to recover this early public appearance by Lincoln as an anti-slavery Republican. A year before Thornton died, Thornton sat for an interview with Root, who then painted the debate, drawing on interviews with surviving attendees and old pictures of those who had died to portray the participants and crowd. Newspaper coverage of the debate reflected the intense partisanship of nineteenth-century journalism, with different papers giving sharply different accounts of the same event. The Democratic newspaper’s use of a racial epithet appealed to the racial fears of white people in antebellum Illinois, and Stephen A. Douglas and other Democrats similarly used the label “black Republicans” to attack the opposition and suggest that Republicans wanted black and white people to be equal citizens under the law.
