Allen C. Guelzo

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Allen C. Guelzo | Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858 | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858

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The year 1858 began with Illinois in the trough of a deep economic recession. The previous August the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of Cincinnati had abruptly closed its doors and declared bankruptcy. That triggered a year of deflated land values, brought railroad construction to a halt on the Illinois Central and Michigan Central railroads, and reduced the supply of bank notes in circulation from $215 million to $155 million. Torrential rains flooded the Midwest in the early summer, sending the Ohio River up to forty-one feet at Cincinnati and flooding the southern-tip Illinois city of Cairo.¹ Tsar Alexander II took the first steps toward emancipating Russian serfs, the transatlantic cable carried its first message, and Donati's comet, with two brilliant tails easily visible to the naked eye, arced through the summer sky. But of all these events, not one took the attention of Illinois and the nation like the election campaigns that were carried on across Illinois in the late summer and autumn of 1858 by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. In Dallas, Texas, the Lincoln-Douglas campaigns were termed "one of the most exciting political contests that has ever occurred." William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator reported that "Illinois is all in a blaze just now. Lincoln and Douglas, candidates for the United States Senate, are canvassing the State." At least "for the time being," one Washington, D.C., newspaper remarked, "Illinois becomes, as it were, the Union." Whatever else Illinois and the nation had to think about in 1858, they thought with a peculiar passion about Lincoln and Douglas.²

Illinois in 1858, showing state senate districts. In 1858 U.S. senators were elected indirectly. Illinois voters chose members of the state senate and house who then voted for the U.S. senatorial candidates of their parties. Both the Democratic candidate (Stephen Douglas) and the Republican (Abraham Lincoln) hoped to win voters in a belt of districts in the middle of the state where the two parties were competitive.

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