Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01 eBook

[Relocated Footnote (4):  Thurlow Weed says in his Autobiography, Vol.  I., p. 603:  “I had supposed, until we now met, that I had never seen Mr. Lincoln, having forgotten that in the fall of 1848, when he took the stump in New England, he called upon me at Albany, and that we went to see Mr. Fillmore, who was then the Whig candidate for Vice-President.”  The New York “Tribune,” September 14, 1848, mentions Mr. Lincoln as addressing a great Whig meeting in Boston, September 12.  The Boston “Atlas” refers to speeches made by him at Dorchester, September 16; at Chelsea September 17; by Lincoln and Seward at Boston, September 22, on which occasion the report says:  “Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, next came forward, and was received with great applause.  He spoke about an hour and made a powerful and convincing speech which was cheered to the echo.”

Mr. Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., in his recent memoir of the Hon. David Sears, says, the most brilliant of Mr. Lincoln’s speeches in this campaign “was delivered at Worcester, September 13, 1848, when, after taking for his text Mr. Webster’s remark that the nomination of Martin Van Buren for the Presidency by a professed antislavery party could fitly be regarded only as a trick or a joke, Mr. Lincoln proceeded to declare that of the three parties then asking the confidence of the country, the new one had less of principle than any other, adding, amid shouts of laughter, that the recently constructed elastic Free-Soil platform reminded him of nothing so much as the pair of trousers offered for sale by a Yankee peddler which were ’large enough for any man and small enough for any boy.’”

It is evident that he considered Van Buren, in Massachusetts at least, a candidate more to be feared than Cass, the regular Democratic nominee.]

CHAPTER XVI

A FORTUNATE ESCAPE

When Congress came together again in December, there was such a change in the temper of its members that no one would have imagined, on seeing the House divided, that it was the same body which had assembled there a year before.  The election was over; the Whigs were to control the Executive Department of the Government for four years to come; the members themselves were either reflected or defeated; and there was nothing to prevent the gratification of such private feelings as they might have been suppressing during the canvass in the interest of their party.  It was not long before some of the Northern Democrats began to avail themselves of this new liberty.  They had returned burdened with a sense of wrong.  They had seen their party put in deadly peril by reason of its fidelity to the South, and they had seen how little their Southern brethren cared for their labors and sacrifices, in the enormous gains which Taylor had made in the South, carrying eight out of fifteen slave States.  They were in the humor to avenge themselves by a display of independence on their own account, at the first