Academic literature on the topic 'Whig party. Illinois'

This chapter examines how Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy were brought together by a common vision to end slavery. Lincoln, a Springfield lawyer, and Lovejoy, a Princeton pastor, met for the first time at the Springfield State Fair in Illinois on October 4, 1854. At that time, both Lincoln and Lovejoy were angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act championed by Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln wanted the Whigs and Lovejoy wanted the Republican Party to lead the “fusion” movement uniting all those opposed to Douglas's law and advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise. In a speech, Lincoln declared, “This...real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.” Lovejoy, one of those in attendance, identified with Lincoln's emotion and conviction, as his brother, Elijah, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. This chapter first discusses the beginning of the Republican Party in Illinois before turning to his and Lincoln's election to the Illinois House of Representatives on November 7, 1854.

This chapter examines the Universal Democratic Republicans, which formed the core of the union of “liberal societies” by early 1854. The listed participants included both the “Free Democratic League (Americans, opposed to the Extension of Slavery)” and the “Ouvrier Circle (American workmen).” Given that the personnel of these groups overlapped, the Brotherhood of the Union in New York saw itself alongside the revolutionary secret societies of Europe and their successors and, in an American context, as part of the radical wing of the antislavery movement. This coalition addressed American politics on its own. That July, it recommended Hugh Forbes's Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer as “indispensable for the Revolutionists” and endorsed the view of American politics reflected in Forbes's “Catechism” that described the Democrats and Whigs as existing “to procure public occupation in the diplomatic service, custom house, post office, treasury, patent office, land office, municipality, police, or any other where salary and profit can be enjoyed.”

The introduction outlines the history of Illinois, focusing on populations of southerners, immigrants, Indians, and enslaved blacks and their various effects on four constitutional conventions held between 1818 and 1869. The biography of Abraham Lincoln organizes the discussion: his migration to the state with other southerners, his service in the state legislature and as a U.S. representative as a Whig, his debates with Stephen Douglas, his election to president representing the new Republican Party, and the legacy of his efforts to unite the nation and to emancipate blacks during the Civil War. Themes of north versus south, rural versus urban (i.e., Chicago), slavery versus freedom, economic and railroad development, and debates about executive, legislative, and judicial powers shaped each of Illinois’s nineteenth-century constitutional conventions.