Political Landscape Of 1860 Analysis

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Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858 Allen C. Guelzo For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see Teaching íAí JAH, http://vvww.indiana.edu/^jah/teaching/. The year 1858 began witb Illinois in the trough of a deep economic recession. The previous August the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of Cincinnati bad abruptly closed its doors and declared bankruptcy. That triggered a year of deflated land values, brought railroad construction to a halt on the Illinois Central and Michigan Central railroads, and reduced the supply of bank notes in circulation from $215 million to $155 million. Torrential rains flooded the Midwest in the early summer, sending the Ohio River up to…show more content…
Stephen Arnold Douglas had emerged by the 1850s as the single greatest name in Democratic party politics, supported by a formidable political machine across Illinois constructed of federal patronage appointments that he oversaw and buttressed by major corporations (principally the Illinois Central Railroad) whose interests he was in a position to favor. But as a northerner and a promoter of the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" as the solution to the problem of slavery in the western territories, Douglas was mis•' For an example of how skepticism itself can become folklore, see David Zarefsky. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (Chicago, 1990), x. Zarefsky underscored the irrelevance of the debates by observing that the American Almanac for 1859 does nor mention the debates. That is because tbe Almanacs listing o f General Events for 1858" stopped at August 25, 1858—just after the first of tbe debates at Ottawa and nine weeks before the general legislative election in Illinois—in order to make a December press deadline. See The American Almanac and Repository of Usefi4l KnowUdge for the Year /ÍÍ.5ÍJ (Boston, 1859), 371. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (2 vols., Boston, 1928), II, 635; Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 182/~1861 (Princeton, 1971): Ronald P Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties. ¡790s-l840s (New York. 1983); Richard P McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Cbapel Hill, 1966); Lee Benson, The Concept ofjäcksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961); Clenn C. Altscbuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2000), 152-53; David M.
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