It is December 10, 1856.
Abraham Lincoln is speaking at a Republican dinner in Chicago, four weeks after the Republican presidential candidate, John Frémont, lost the election.
And Lincoln has a warning for the new president, who did not receive a majority of the vote.
The winner was James Buchanan, a Northerner who supported the ‘states’ rights’ argument Southerners used to justify slavery.
And the Southern states had rewarded Buchanan by giving him all of their electoral votes.
Buchanan had carried only four Northern states and had won his home state by just a small margin.
And it had been a race full of smears and dirty tricks.
Frémont supporters were called ‘radical’ and ‘extremist.’
And there were widespread suspicions that Buchanan’s win was the result of illegal payoffs.
[Does this sound familiar?]
From Lincoln’s speech:
“Like a rejected lover, making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President felicitates hugely over the late Presidential election.
He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones.
He says the people did it.
He forgets that the ‘people,’ as he complacently calls only those who voted for [him], are in a minority.
Remembering this, he might perceive that the ‘rebuke’ may not be quite as durable as he seems to think---that the majority may not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority.
The President thinks the great body of us Frémonters, being ardently attached to liberty, were duped by a few wicked and designing men.
There is a slight difference of opinion on this.
We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, was duped by men who had liberty every way.
He is in the cat's paw [ie., the unwitting tool of another].
By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws [will be] burnt off to the gristle,
and he [will be] thrown aside as unfit for further use.”
You heard it here first.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Lincoln’s speech has been edited for brevity.
Share this post