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Lincoln at Peoria

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Lewis Lehrman provides a thorough and interesting reconstruction of this pivotal Lincoln address. Here, in October of 1854, Lincoln marked his public transition from Illinois politician to national anti-slavery statesman.

Lehrman documents how Lincoln, in this rhetorical masterpiece, launched his powerful attack on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed by Congress only five months before. The Kansas-Nebraska Act voided the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery to spread to northern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln clearly saw that the Act undermined the hope that slavery would naturally take the road to extinction as America spread west.

Lehrman shows how most of Lincoln's future antislavery arguments were contained, at least in embryonic form, in this trail-blazing address. It was a speech that changed Lincoln, making him a permanent enemy to the expansion of slavery and the amoral pro-choice arguments of Senator Douglas, and setting the nation on the path to civil war.

Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point is an in-depth, historical and critical analysis of Abraham Lincoln's three-hour speech delivered at Peoria on October 16, 1854. The speech would come to mark a crucial turning point in Lincoln's political career, and therefore the history of America. Chapters give extensive historical context and frame of reference to Lincoln's speech, which firmly established his opposition to the further extension of slavery in the American republic and embodying Lincoln's anti-slavery campaign. A seminal and scholarly reference, Lincoln at Peoria is especially recommended for college library and American history shelves.

This book provides excellent insight into the development of Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary leadership. I enjoyed the little details that helped me understand his charisma. Like most Americans, I had an understanding of the broad strokes of Lincoln's viewpoints, but this detailed analysis of a critically formative period really illustrated it in a powerful way. At points I almost felt as if I was right there. Lehrman clearly brought a powerful curiosity to this project and I'm grateful that he's shared the fruits of his labor with us.

Many legends, from the factual to the sublime, have been constructed about the rise of Abraham Lincoln from obscure, backwoodsman, through personal and political defeat to the Presidency of the United States at its most crucial time. Lewis Lehrman shares his life's work and passion while illustrating that the true turning point in the political fortunes of Mr. Lincoln was a speech that he gave concerning "America's peculiar institution" of slavery in Peoria, IL on October 16, 1854. In the telling, he shows how this became a remarkable turning point in American and, indeed, world history.

Read more at: http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/lincoln_at_peoria_the_turning_point

Lincoln At Peoria, The Turning Point
by Lewis E. Lehrman
published by Stackpole Books
2008
"Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution?" Mr. Lincoln, Peoria October 16, 1854.

Lincoln at Peoria is a stout tome of 412 pages, adorned by 808 footnotes and 14 pages of bibliography. The complete transcription of the three-hour speech in question occupies 51 of the pages.

At first glance, this work is a detailed analysis of what the Mr. Lehrman considers the defining point in the political career of Abraham Lincoln. He proceeds by investigating the development of Lincoln's political views leading to that precise and settled presentation at Peoria, dissecting the speech in great detail, and thoroughly demonstrating that Lincoln was guided by the foundations established therewith, from that point on until his death.

Surprisingly, what emerged for this reader was a distilled and simple picture of the temperament and philosophy of Abraham Lincoln. Contrary to some who would claim his mantle in our times, the author paints Lincoln as a conserver, pointing out that he was a "self-described conservative." Although he would use harsh means as President in order to save the Union, Lincoln was neither a radical nor a revolutionary seeking to set the nation on some new path - on the contrary, he was a purist and reformer, always urging a return to first and foundational principles. And he found those principles foremost in the Declaration of Independence, which he placed on an almost scriptural pedestal.

"In Lincoln's judgment, the objective moral order of the Declaration of Independence was timeless, universal, and immutable." Lehrman, pg 239

Over and over from Peoria, to Gettysburg and beyond, Mr. Lincoln spoke in hallowed tones of a "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." In Lincoln?s view, the essence of Liberty was the freedom to enjoy the fruits of ones own labor; that without this Liberty, Equality was left an empty platitude. And so Lincoln repeatedly called the nation to return to lofty vision of the Founders, with a new resolve to bring that vision to fulfillment.

Lehrman shows Lincoln to be an international man as well who spoke not only to the nation, but to people everywhere. Lincoln saw the temptation to profit from another mans toil as a universal human temptation. He decried the failure of the nation to live up to its professed ideals in the eyes of a watching world.

"I hate it (indifference to slavery) because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world - enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites - causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty - criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest." Mr. Lincoln, Peoria October 16, 1854.

Lehrman declares that Lincoln believed in the objective moral order; that this was the real difference between Lincoln and his main antagonist, that other famous Democratic Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas. Douglas could never follow Lincoln from the plane of rights to the higher question of right and wrong.

"If you admit that slavery is wrong," Douglas "cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong." Mr. Lincoln, Galesburg October 7, 1858.

So in this day when many would claim the right to the mantle of Abraham Lincoln, this book will help us to see the real Lincoln with clarity and to deny that mantle to those who may bare some resemblance to the image, but do not share the essence, of the man.

"Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity." Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south - let all Americans - let all lovers of liberty everywhere - join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations." Mr. Lincoln, Peoria October 16, 1854.

http://www.cirtl.org/lincoln_at_peoria.html

I am not a historian and have never fully grasped the greatness of Abraham Lincoln amid the towers of tomes that loom over this man and cast him in the multifarious shadows of his eminent biographers, impersonators, and iconographers. The eminent polymath Lewis Lehrman here has made the splendid strategic decision to stand back and let the man himself speak, while providing a rich and illuminating, wise and comprehensive study of the historic context. As a result the reader not only senses, and almost directly experiences, the greatness of Lincoln but also can grasp how a speech and a historic moment converged to propel this unlikely man to the center of our nation's supreme crisis and then to the pantheon of our greatest men. By focusing intensely on a single historic moment, Lehrman has achieved a more profound and convincing image of greatness than historians who approach their subject across wider paths of time and space.

At the heart of the matter is an issue that grows ever more acute--the meaning of "popular sovereignty," vaunted by Stephen Douglas as the answer to Lincoln's assertion that democratic majorities, however large and confident, have no right to enslave human beings. At the time the key issue was actual slavery. Today the demagogues of "popular sovereignty" favor a new and more subtle enslavement of the most productive citizens by majorities "spreading the wealth" to themselves. Lehrman shows that the Peoria speech and crisis remains a pivotal expression of both the vital promise and the continuing perils of popular majoritarian democracy. Lincoln understood deeply that democracy can only thrive in the context of an enduring moral and legal order affirmed by the religious truths of the Declaration of Independence.

This book is well organized, very thorough, and a faithful representation of the facts regarding Lincoln's restart of his political career and, in particular, an analysis of Stephen Douglas's advocacy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This book should be read in conjunction with a biography of Lincoln, perhaps by Guelzo or Holzer.

Lewis Lehrman has written an informative intellectual history of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's political activities prove the adage that ideas have consequences. While the Peoria Speech is central to the book, Lehrman has produced a valuable study of the political ideas that led to the Civil War and the political leaders who espoused these ideas.

Along with Lincoln, we get memorable portraits of Senator Douglas, Alexander Stephens, and many of the central political figures of the day. While I studied American History this book filled a lot of gaps in my education. For example, before reading this book I did not appreciate Lincoln's insistence that his way was fulfilling the beliefs of the nation's founders and not a radical break from the past. Lehrman's mastery of his subject is constantly on display for the benefit of the reader.

If you want to delve into the ideas and personalities of the public figures in the lead up to the Civil War this book is a must read.And along the way you will be transported to a bygone era when politicians discussed and debated important issues and audiences listened for hours on end. In other words the pre-sound bite era.

It was a difficult book to get through at times, still the same it was an interesting restoration of this critical Lincoln address.

The blurbs on the dust jacket overhype the book. Albeit a very important speech in American history, I am not sure this one anti-slavery effort in Peoria by Mr. Lincoln requires a new explanatory book.

Lewis Lehrman is a big time Lincoln buff, but he is not a polished writer of the first rank. His narrative often does not easily flow and he seems to me more interested in dropping in quotes from almost every notable historian of Lincoln and the Civil War period than in providing his own original analysis.

I do hope after wading through a somewhat heavy text readers will study Abraham Lincoln's quite logical and convincing speech, provided at the book's end, which helped propel this extraordinary man to The White House.