In Their Springfield Prime

In 1854, Abraham Lincoln returned publicly to politics after a five-year hiatus as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the U.S. Congress and overturned the 1820 Missouri Compromise line. Fearing the spread of slavery to western territories, Lincoln was aroused "as he had never been before." At the Old State Capitol on October 4, 1854, he delivered a three-hour speech that contemporaries called one of the ablest and most effective of his life and the occasion of his becoming a great antislavery leader. Declaring that his ancient faith taught him that all men are created equal and that there could be no moral right in one man making a slave of another, he attacked Douglas's arguments so forcefully that Republican newspapers boasted Douglas had never before endured such a remorseless tearing of his flimsy arguments. Lincoln repeated the speech in Peoria two weeks later, and it became known in history as the Peoria Speech, which historians consider one of his most significant addresses. In the same period, Mary Todd Lincoln, a well-bred daughter of Kentucky aristocrats, tried to educate her husband, the rough son of illiterate Kentucky dirt farmers, in proper dress and social behavior. Their first big purchase as a married couple was superior black cloth for a man's suit, and her biographer described her influence as a marriage-long course in middle-class etiquette. In Mary's time, women were expected to guard family morality and Christian conduct, and her efforts to gentrify her husband fit that role, but unlike conventional political wives of her day, she was openly ambitious for his success and assertive in offering political advice, drawing much criticism and paying a price for being ahead of her time.

Springfield, Illinois · United States