"To Protect the Rights of the White Race:" Illinois Republican Racial Politics in the 1860 Campaign and the Twenty-Second General Assembly

Abstract

on A JuLy MoRnIng In 1860, under overcast skies and intermittent rain, Republicans in Pekin raised a 140foot pole to drum up enthusiasm for their party’s candidates. A brass band played while families from the surrounding countryside streamed into town in carriages and on foot. On a nearby hilltop close to the Illinois River sat a wigwam, a makeshift meeting hall consisting of tiered seats under a board roof. A crowd estimated around 5,000 gathered there in the afternoon, eager to hear U.S. Senator Lyman Trumbull speak. The senator’s seat was up for election and whichever party won control of the state legislature in the fall would decide who would fill it. The present legislature, which was controlled by Democrats, had chosen Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln for senator two years earlier. Unless the Republicans wrestled control from the Democrats in the general assembly, Trumbull would lose his seat. It was no coincidence that he came to Pekin, the seat of Tazewell County, to campaign. Located in the highly contested battleground of central Illinois, voters in Tazewell County were going to cast ballots for both a state senator and a state representative at the next election. The rain abated as Trumbull addressed the crowd. He spoke briefly on economic issues but focused mainly on the Democracy’s fanaticism for extending slavery westward. Trumbull contrasted this with the Republican creed, which “favors the giving of our public lands to free white men—not to negro slaves.” The audience cheered.1 Trumbull’s statement captured the guiding principle of Republican ideology and also exposed its ambiguities. Stopping the spread of slavery