Extra Credit Questions

[David Lockmiller]

(05-14-2024 05:44 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  David,

Just because Lincoln turned down the territorial governorship that didn't lead to his becoming president, just as if he had accepted it that wouldn't have precluded it.


Best
Rob

[Lincoln] was offered the more lucrative and prestigious governorship of Oregon (paying $3000 per year), which tempted him. John Todd Stuart and Lincoln were in Bloomington attending Court when a special messenger arrived informing him of the Oregon governorship offer. When Lincoln asked Stuart if he should accept, his former law partner said he “thought it was a good thing: that he could go out there and in all likelihood come back from there as a Senator when the State was admitted.” Lincoln “finally made up his mind that he would accept the place if Mary would consent to go. But Mary would not consent to go out there.” 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.” She “had had enough of frontier life.”

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.”

Some thought Lincoln’s defeat a blessing in disguise. Richard W. Thompson believed that Lincoln’s failure to win the commissionership of the General Land Office was “most fortunate both for him and the country.” If he had been successful, Thompson speculated, he would have stayed on in Washington, “separated from the people of Illinois,” sinking “down into the grooves of a routine office, so that he would never have reached the eminence he afterwards achieved as a lawyer, or have become President of the United States."

Rob, this is what normal people call "reasoned argument." What would the Lincoln-Douglas debates have been like, at a critical point in this nation's history, if Lincoln had not been one of the participants?

David