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| Indian mound on which a platform was erected for the speeches in Kalamazoo in 1856 |
It was a crowd tense with the passions of a turbulent political hour. There were Know Nothings, Free Soilers, Whigs, Libertyites, Prohibitionists, Southrons, Nebraska Partyites, Republicans and Democrats.
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| John C. Fremont Republican candidate for President - 1856 |
DUST HERALDS COMING.
From the Grand River valley, pilgrims, said a contemporary newspaper account, "came up in wagons, with a procession three and a half miles long,"men, women and children on holiday bent. Their coming was outlined against the horizon by a gradually advancing cloud of dust rising from the dry roads and at times enveloping horses, vehicles and humans in choking clouds. But discomforts were overlooked; there were two bands and refreshments.
From Jackson came "600 sturdy freemen," many in uniform and mounted on horses caparisoned and restive, escorting wagons bearing whole families eager for the merrymaking that was to accompany the oratory.
FOR two days the roads leading into Kalamazoo were astir. Each arrival --- be it delegation, wagon-load or horseman, was met by townspeople and directed to camping spot or boarding places. The people of Kalamazoo, hosts of the throng, had no politics for the occasion. The town was a sea of banners.
Trains, too, brought in their quotas of partisans, pickpockets, and visitors.
On the day of the speechmaking "an immense pavilion upon the public square," said the Detroit Daily Advertiser, "was occupied by a free public table, which was replenished as fast as it was emptied.
FREE FOOD FOR ALL.
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| Home of Hezekiah Wells where Abraham Lincoln stayed while in Kalamazoo |
"The table, which extended around the periphery of the marquee, was over 100 feet in length, with cross tables, and was supplied with beef, bread, coffee, tea, butter, potatoes, etc."
Among the "etc." were 400 hams.
Perhaps Lincoln regaled himself at the pavilion tables, but more likely he dined with Hezekiah G. Wells, whose house guest he was. He had arrived in Kalamazoo the preceding Sunday.
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| Hezekiah G. Wells hosted Lincoln in 1856 |
CARNIVAL SPIRIT.
The carnival spirit of these political gatherings was not new to him---such was the order of those days. Meetings were dramatic and picturesque and not confined to the partisans of the speaker. On that day Lincoln probably heard sung the popular Democratic ballad, "The Song of Fusion," sung to the tune of "Susanna."
A verse of that, aimed at Prohibitionists and Know Nothings (the secret American Party with the password of "Sam"), goes:
Poor Bijah Mann gave Preston King
A warm fraternal hug.
Said Preston, 'Temp'rance is the thing';
Said Bijah, 'Where's the jug?'
Poor Preston talked of 'Texas votes,'
While Bijah talked of 'Sam."
Then both of Temp'rance talked awhile---
And then they took a dram.
The chorus to this, which sometimes was sung in 1858 in Illinois, with Lincoln's name substituted for that of Horace Greeley, ran:
Poor Greeley, don't you cry.
Oh! Poor Greeley,
Don't you cry for me.
I'm coming up Salt River now,
So come and go with me.
GRAND PARADE.
There was a "grand parade," of course. "Two processions, 31 in each, represented the sister states, dressed in white, while bleeding Kansas followed sorrowfully behind, shrouded in mourning, deeply veiled, and bearing a rent and blackened flag." So ran the Advertiser description, while on the same morning the Democratic Free Press "wondered what melancholy had caused her to don the sables."
The line of march was led by the "Spirit of "76" --- musicians historically garbed --- followed by costumed "Minute Men" and "impersonators" of the "Original Thirteen" colonies. Surely a gala parade.
THE speech made that day by Lincoln was not one that has come down in history, but it had a significance that has grown with time. Students of Lincoln would do well to read the very complete account of it written by "O. D." in the only existing file of the Advertiser, which is in the Burton Historic Collection in the Detroit Public library.
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| Detroit Public Library |
And a study of that speech will confound hundreds of thousands of things printed about him after he was dead.
It is important particularly because of its bearing on two other speeches about which so much controversy has arisen. One was the "Lost Speech" of Bloomington, Ill. of May 29, 1856, and the other the famous "House Divided" address of 1858.
MYTHS EXPLODED.
No complete report of the Bloomington speech was made at the time. Years later what purported to be extracts from this speech, as remembered by some who heard it, were used in attacking Lincoln. In 1906 Henry Clay Whitney
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| Henry Clay Whitney |
At a meeting in 1906 of the Bloomington residents who had heard the speech, the Whitney version was read and their unanimous verdict was: "The speech is still lost."
NO DEMOGOGY HERE.
Had these Bloomington residents read the accounts of the Kalamazoo speech they might have agreed that the "Lost Speech" had been found in its main substance, for the salient thought of that earlier speech had been repeated.
There was no demagogy indulged in by Lincoln in Bloomington or Kalamazoo. "Mr. Lincoln of Illinois," remarked the Kalamazoo Gazette of the Michigan speech, "was the only foreign speaker in attendance. He made a very fair and argumentative address; but was far too conservative and Union-loving to suit his audience; and upon one occasion, at least, his hearers protested in emphatic tones against his views."
Considering the violent partisanships of the time, the compliment speaks volumes for the hold Lincoln this day gained over the minds of many who were hostile toward his presence before his speech had begun.
THE 'HOUSE DIVIDED.'
The Kalamazoo speech began much as did the "House Divided" address of two years later that was in after years to be subject to misinterpretation.
"Fellow countrymen: Under the Constitution of the United States another Presidential contest approaches us. All over this land---that portion, at least, of which I know much---the people are assembling to consider the proper course to be adopted by them. One of the finest considerations is to learn what the people differ about. If we ascertain what we differ about, we shall be better able to decide."
On June 16, 1858, before the convention at Springfield, Ill., which had nominated him to oppose Stephan A. Douglas
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| Young Stephen A. Douglas |
"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."
Lincoln on March 4, 1843, had warned his discordant Illinois party that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
On Aug. 15, 1855, he wrote: "Our political problem now is, "Can we as a nation continue together permanently---forever---half slave and half free?" The problem is too mighty for me. may God, in his mercy, superintend the solution."
By the use of the quotation marks he indicated that the "house divided" figure of speech was merely a quotation, probably familiar to thousands.
In his 1858 speech he said: "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."
But out of all this Edgar Lee Masters was later to charge that because of Lincoln's conception of the "House Divided" metaphor in so dangerous a time as 1858, "the Lincoln mind. . . .cannot be understood on any other basis than that he was a demagog."
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| Edgar Lee Masters |
SCORES SLAVERY.
In Kalamazoo Lincoln said:
"This Government is sought to be put on a new track. Slavery is to be made a ruling element in our Government. The question can be avoided in but two ways. By the one, we must submit and allow slavery to triumph, or, by the other, we must triumph over the black demon." (by preventing its spread through the ballot.)
The question of extension of slavery he told his Michigan audience, "should be not only the greatest question, but the sole question." Yet "it may be charged that we will not be content with restricting slavery in the new territories." This was natural, as many Republicans were convinced the Democratic platform bound James Buchanan
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| James Buchanan - Democrat Won the presidency in 1856 |
Blame for the existence of slavery among us, he asserted, rests on Great Britain. "She would not interfere to prevent it, and so individuals were enabled to introduce the institution without opposition." Was not the policy of the Democracy, he asked, threatening to place the United States in a similar way of blame from the territories?
In the matter of slavery in Kansas being left to the people to decide, the speaker did not think it could be decided fairly with slaves already introduced. This on the theory that one man of 10 who was a slave-owner, if a good neighbor and wealthy, with the other nine obligated to him, easily might influence the votes of the nine, because "they like the man, although they don't like the system by which he hold his fellowmen in bondage."
"And here let me say," he added, "that, in intellectual and physical structure, our Southern brethren do not differ from us. They are, like us, subject to passions, and it is only their odious institution of slavery that makes the breach between us."
MET WITH FROWNS.
When Lincoln, said the Democratic Kalamazoo Gazette, of Aug. 29, "proclaimed that Southern men had hearts, consciences and intellects like those around him, he was met with a frowning countenance. If he declared that, could he see slavery agitation permanently ended, and both sections of the Union living again in peace and concord, at the expense of yielding Kansas as a Slave State, he would willingly consent---he was met by a clamor of voices that silenced him at once. If he proclaimed the durability of the Union through the patriotic endeavors of both Northern and Southern men, the sentiment met no favor at the hands of the ultra-abolition element of the audience. And so on, to the end of his discourse---which, we repeat, was in many respects a fair and candid one---he was constantly treading on the toes of some belonging to the "Republicans" present."
DENIED CHARGES.
Lincoln denied the charges that the Republican party was dominated by abolitionists and that it was moving toward dissolution of the Union.
"They tell us we are in company of men who have long been known as Abolitionists," he said, "Why do not you, Buchanan men, come in and use your influence to make our party respectable? (Laughter). How is the dissolution of the Union to be consummated? . . . A majority will never dissolve the Union. Can a minority do it?"
In bringing his speech to a close, Lincoln asked the Democrats in the audience if they had not, since passage of the Nebraska bill, found themselves making"arguments which you never would have made before? . . . If you answer this in the affirmative, see how a whole party have been turned away from their love of liberty? Throw off these things, and come to the rescue of this great principle of equality. Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties. And not to Democrats alone do I make this appeal, but to all who love these great and true principles."
Finally, that which will be recognized in its likeness to the conclusion the "House Divided" speech: "Come, and keep coming! Strike, and strike again! So sure as God lives, the victory shall be yours."
OF the tempers ruffled by Lincoln's speech, that of Zachariah Chandler
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| Zachariah Chandler Radical Republican Senator from Michigan who gave Lincoln fits during his presidency |
A member of the Republican National Committee, and already a power with the Abolitionists of that and of his home State, Chandler seemed to view Lincoln's presence, as well as the conciliatory drift of his address, only as a gratuitous effort to undermine his influence. The impersonal aspects seem never to have entered his head.
Hence it was that out of this Kalamazoo "Rally" evolved his bitter fight on Lincoln in the Chicago convention of 1860, where he held Michigan in the Seward line even after all other states had gone over to the favorite son of Illinois; his personally conducted Committee of the Conduct of the War---"a marplot," Lincoln is said to have called it---the cost of which to the country in blood and treasure never can be reckoned; his attempt on July 6, 1862, to brand Lincoln on the floor of the Senate as a traitor, at a time when the North was on the threshold of a major military defeat; the accumulating bitternesses which, when Lincoln lay dead, could prompt him openly to gloat over tragedy, and, finally, his decisive part in the crushing campaign brought to bear against Andrew Johnson when the latter would not repudiate the Lincoln policies of conciliation toward the South---the same policies that had been forecast at Kalamazoo, on this Aug. 27, 1856, and elsewhere, before and after, times without number.
Michigan in 1857 ensconced Chandler in high place, only to discover before the American War of 1861-5 had gotten under way that he had forged for her political chains that required years to sunder. But, through her Democratic and conservative Republican sons, she fought valiantly Lincoln's personal battle, and in the end smashed the Chandler machine.
The larger drama that was brewed in Kalamazoo is so far untold; but it lies, a coherent and tragic entity, in official and other incontrovertible records, undimmed now by the prejudice and expediency that so long screen it from view.
(Copyright 1934 by Stephen Ira Gilchrist)
The above article was published in The Detroit News on Sunday, February 11, 1934.
This is one account of Lincoln's only documented visit to Michigan. There are a number of communities that claim a visit by Lincoln but none have shown proof of that visit.
On August 27, 2006 this writer had the honor and privilege to recreate Lincoln's speech on the occasion of its 150th anniversary at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo.
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| Fred Priebe portraying Abraham Lincoln recreating the Kalamazoo speech August 27, 2006 |
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