Lincoln's Three-Hour Argument

On October sixteenth, eighteen fifty-four, Abraham Lincoln rose to speak in Peoria and began to speak. He would not finish for three hours. Historians who have studied his career call what followed the most consequential speech he ever gave.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas had spent the fall touring the state to defend a law he had muscled through Congress that spring: the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The act allowed settlers in new territories to vote on whether to permit slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty, which had banned slavery above the thirty-six-thirty parallel. Douglas had spoken earlier that day. Now Lincoln, who had been following him on the circuit, had the floor.

Lincoln was not yet the Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial. He had served one term in Congress, returned to Illinois, and, by his own account, had largely withdrawn from politics. He later wrote, "I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again." The Peoria speech was what he said when he was aroused.

He attacked Douglas's logic methodically, historical, legal, moral. He argued that the founders had tolerated slavery as an existing wrong they could not immediately end but had taken no step to extend. Popular sovereignty, he said, was not a principle. It was a mechanism for making slavery national. He was not calling for immediate abolition. He was calling for the nation to stop moving in the wrong direction.

The published speech ran to many thousands of words. Lincoln revised it himself and sent it to newspapers. It circulated widely. Six years later, he would be president. Five years after that, the Missouri Compromise's essential premise, that slavery's expansion could be contained, would be settled by the bloodiest war in American history.

The Peoria speech is where Lincoln decided what he believed. It took three hours.