Becoming Lincoln

A rift between Stephen Douglas and President James Buchanan appeared to give Abraham Lincoln a break in his run for U.S. Senate. But Lincoln began scrambling to pull Republicans behind him after Douglas started flirting with a bipartisan anti-Buchanan coalition. Sources used:"A Bad Sign." Illinois State Journal, April 14, 1858, p. 2 Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simo

The Scott family's decade-long fight to claim the freedom owed to them under the law ran into state and federal judges determined to close the courts -- and broader citizenship -- to Black Americans. For white Americans like Abraham Lincoln, the Dred Scott ruling forced them to consider how denial of rights to one group of people could leave everyone else's rights open to question.

The 1856 presidential election took place amid a backdrop of violence in Kansas and Congress. Abraham Lincoln threw himself into the fight for the Republican Party and free territories. Sources used:"1856 Democratic Party Platform," hosted on the University of California Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project.Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 201

As the Whig Party withered away in 1855, Abraham Lincoln found himself pulled toward the new Republican Party -- an organization that not only stood foursquare against slavery's expansion, but brought an economic vision that reflected northern attitudes and explicitly rejected the Southern way of life. Sources used:Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 20

Being an enslaved person in America in the 1850s meant the ever-present threat of violence and separation from loved ones. And throughout the decade, the white South became increasingly determined to spread it as far as they could. Sources for this episode: Berlin, Ira and Rowland, Leslie, ed. Families and Freedom: A Documetary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War E

The Kansas-Nebraska Act threw American politics into chaos in 1854. The two-party duopoly that existed for the previous 20 years was swept away in the space of a few months. As Abraham Lincoln fought for the anti-Nebraska coalition in Illinois, he found himself with an unexpected political opportunity -- followed by the most difficult decision of his career to that point.

Nursing his own ambitions and trying to hold onto his power in the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas agreed to introduce legislation repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the upper Midwest to slavery. The brazen assault by pro-slavery forces upended the nation's party system and brought Abraham Lincoln to the forefront of the forces opposing Douglas and defending the Declaration

Abraham Lincoln would never had become president had he not locked horns with Stephen Douglas, whose rapid rise through Illinois politics quickly made him a national icon. Douglas' life had some parallels to Lincoln's, and in many ways, his attraction to money and flexible policy better embodied the America of the early 1850s than the old parties did.

Abraham Lincoln's racial attitudes were complicated. He was willing to defend fugitive slaves and appears to have lived in what was (for its time) an integrated neighborhood. But he also defended a slaveholder in court, and advocated for schemes to persuade African-Americans to leave the land of their birth.

Abraham Lincoln's law practice was dominated by debt cases and the messy but commonplace disputes that make up a legal practice then and now. He plied his trade throughout central Illinois and was a popular companion for other attorneys in his field. But was he a good lawyer?