Highlights Archives
An Abraham Lincoln Remembrance
In the rare book collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society resides a nondescript brown volume whose history puts a human face on a famous episode in American history. The humble-looking book is a first edition of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, held during the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Thousands of copies were sold all over the country during the 1860 presidential campaign. But this copy is unique. It is inscribed, "Hon. Carl Schurz from A. Lincoln."
The seven debates in 1858, leading up to the election that would decide an Illinois U.S. Senate race, focused on slavery. Lincoln argued that African Americans were entitled to "all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence" and he therefore opposed letting any new slave states enter the Union. His opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, on the other hand, thought that the citizens of each state should get to decide whether they wanted slavery to be legal.
On a train carrying him to the debate in Quincy, Illinois, Lincoln ran into Carl Schurz, a German Forty-eighter from Watertown, Wisconsin. "I must confess," Schurz later recalled, "that I was somewhat startled by his appearance. ... I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln's."
After losing the election that fall, Lincoln went home and collected all the debates into a scrapbook. A little over a year later, in May of 1860, the Republican Party held its convention in Chicago. Schurz chaired the Wisconsin delegation, threw his support behind Lincoln, and was appointed to go to Springfield, Illinois, to inform Lincoln he was the Republican nominee for President.
As soon as he got home, Schurz wrote the candidate, promising to "do the work of a hundred men for Abraham Lincoln's election." Lincoln wrote in reply that, "to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself." That summer and fall Schurz campaigned in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, trying to swing the large German-American vote behind Lincoln.
Meanwhile, the Republican Central Executive Committee took Lincoln's scrapbook to a printer in Columbus, Ohio. The printer issued thousands of copies of the now-famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, giving Lincoln 100 for his personal use.
On July 24, 1860, Schurz gave a campaign speech in Lincoln's home town of Springfield. In a letter to his wife (now in the Society's archives), Schurz wrote that Lincoln had sat in the front row during the fiery campaign speech: "When I had finished, he came and shook hands (autsch!) and said, 'You are an awful fellow. I understand your power now.' He gave me a copy of his debates with Douglas, and he and his wife urged me to bring my lady along on my next visit and to be sure to stop with them."
Lincoln was elected that fall, and Schurz attended the inauguration, saw the president frequently through early 1861, and was always received "with great cordiality" at the White House. Lincoln named him ambassador to Spain, but Schurz rushed home when the Civil War broke out to serve as a general in the Union Army. He went on to be a U.S. senator, secretary of the interior, and a popular author; he later published a memoir of Lincoln that included a long account of the debates.
When Schurz died in New York City in 1906, his library of about 2,500 books apparently remained in the family. In 1924 it was bought by Chicago book collector Paul Steinbrecher, a University of Wisconsin graduate who had married Schurz's grand-niece, Edith Anderson. He died in 1937, and in 1962, as she entered her 80s, his widow and her daughters donated the library — including the presentation copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the letter quoted above — to the Society, where it joined more than 200 other letters and manuscripts by Schurz.
:: Posted February 12, 2007
|
