Chapter Twelve “A House Divided”: Lincoln Vs. Douglas (1857-1858
Chapter Twelve “A House Divided”: Lincoln vs. Douglas (1857-1858) Throughout 1857 and the first half of 1858, Lincoln devoted himself to his law practice. In May 1858, when asked to speak publicly, he replied: “It is too early, considering that when I once begin making political speeches I shall have no respite till November. The labor of that I might endure, but I really can not spare the time from my business.”1 But Lincoln did take time to lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions.” In 1855, he and some friends, including Henry C. Whitney, had read and discussed George Bancroft’s recent oration on “The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race,” which celebrated mankind’s progress in the nineteenth century, a period described by Bancroft as “unequaled in its discoveries and its deeds.”2 According to Whitney, Lincoln remarked “that he had for some time been contemplating the writing of a lecture on man . from his earliest primeval state to his present high development, and he detailed at length the views and opinions he designed to incorporate in his 1 Lincoln to Jediah F. Alexander, Springfield, 15 May 1858, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols. plus index; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 2:446. 2 Bancroft’s oration, delivered in New York on 20 November 1854, in Bancroft, Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857), 481-517. 1242 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 12 lecture.”3 Mrs.
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