Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,923 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings.

Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,923 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings.
sagacious ones will “believe and tremble.”  And why shall the Whigs not all rally again?  Are their principles less dear now than in 1840?  Have any of their doctrines since then been discovered to be untrue?  It is true, the victory of 1840 did not produce the happy results anticipated; but it is equally true, as we believe, that the unfortunate death of General Harrison was the cause of the failure.  It was not the election of General Harrison that was expected to produce happy effects, but the measures to be adopted by his administration.  By means of his death, and the unexpected course of his successor, those measures were never adopted.  How could the fruits follow?  The consequences we always predicted would follow the failure of those measures have followed, and are now upon us in all their horrors.  By the course of Mr. Tyler the policy of our opponents has continued in operation, still leaving them with the advantage of charging all its evils upon us as the results of a Whig administration.  Let none be deceived by this somewhat plausible, though entirely false charge.  If they ask us for the sufficient and sound currency we promised, let them be answered that we only promised it through the medium of a national bank, which they, aided by Mr. Tyler, prevented our establishing.  And let them be reminded, too, that their own policy in relation to the currency has all the time been, and still is, in full operation.  Let us then again come forth in our might, and by a second victory accomplish that which death prevented in the first.  We can do it.  When did the Whigs ever fail if they were fully aroused and united?  Even in single States, under such circumstances, defeat seldom overtakes them.  Call to mind the contested elections within the last few years, and particularly those of Moore and Letcher from Kentucky, Newland and Graham from North Carolina, and the famous New Jersey case.  In all these districts Locofocoism had stalked omnipotent before; but when the whole people were aroused by its enormities on those occasions, they put it down, never to rise again.

We declare it to be our solemn conviction, that the Whigs are always a majority of this nation; and that to make them always successful needs but to get them all to the polls and to vote unitedly.  This is the great desideratum.  Let us make every effort to attain it.  At every election, let every Whig act as though he knew the result to depend upon his action.  In the great contest of 1840 some more than twenty one hundred thousand votes were cast, and so surely as there shall be that many, with the ordinary increase added, cast in 1844 that surely will a Whig be elected President of the United States.

A. Lincoln.  S. T. Logan.  A. T. Bledsoe.

March 4, 1843.

TO JOHN BENNETT.

Springfield, March 7, 1843. 
Friend Bennett

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