Extra Credit Questions

[David Lockmiller]

Rob Wick Quote:

A candidate needed 152 votes of the 303 available to win the White House. Had Lincoln lost Illinois, he still would have received 169 electoral votes (from the five I mentioned and the various smaller states he also won) and easily won the presidency. So not only was Illinois NOT critical to Lincoln's victory, but accepting the territorial governorship would not have caused "irreparable" harm.

Best
Rob

So, in his last sentence, Rob effectively mixes fact with his opinion that diverged significantly from Lincoln's final decision on the matter at hand.

Yes, it is a fact that 152 was the number of electoral votes needed to win the presidential election, "but accepting the territorial governorship would not have caused 'irreparable' harm" is only Rob's opinion.

Professor Burlingame wrote:

Joshua Speed later told Stuart “that Lincoln wrote to him that if he [Speed] would go along, he would give him any appointment out there which he might be able to control. Lincoln evidently thought that if Speed and Speed’s wife were to go along, it would be an inducement for Mary to change her mind and consent to go. But Speed thought he could not go, and so the matter didn’t come to anything. "During her husband’s presidency Mary Lincoln “did not fail to remind him that her advice, when he was wavering, had restrained him from ‘throwing himself away’ on a distant territorial governorship.”

And so Lincoln returned to Springfield. Shortly after his defeat by Butterfield, while pacing the floor of his room, he suddenly stopped and “looking up to the ceiling in his peculiar manner” told a friend: “I am worth about three Thousand Dollars. I have a little property paid for and owe no debts. It is perhaps well that I did not get this appointment. I will go home and resume my practice at which I can make a living – and perhaps some day the People may have use for me.”