Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858

Abstract

The year 1858 began with in the trough of a deep economic recession. The pre vious August the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of Cincinnati had abruptly closed its doors and declared bankruptcy. That triggered a year of deflated land values, brought railroad construction to a halt on the Central and Michigan Central railroads, and reduced the supply of bank notes in circulation from $215 million to $155 million. Torrential rains flooded the Midwest in the early summer, sending the Ohio River up to forty-one feet at Cincinnati and flooding the southern-tip city of Cairo.1 Tsar Alexander II took the first steps toward emancipating Russian serfs, the transatlantic cable carried its first message, and Donati's comet, with two brilliant tails easily visible to the naked eye, arced through the summer sky. But of all these events, not took the attention of and the nation like the election campaigns that were carried on across in the late summer and autumn of 1858 by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. In Dallas, Texas, the Lincoln-Douglas campaigns were termed one of the most exciting political contests that has ever occurred. William Lloyd Gar rison's Liberator reported that Illinois is all in a blaze just now. Lincoln and Douglas, candidates the United States Senate, are canvassing the State. At least for the time being, Washington, DC, newspaper remarked, Illinois becomes, as it were, the Union. Whatever else and the nation had to think about in 1858, they thought with a peculiar passion about Lincoln and Douglas.2