Abraham Lincoln's Impromptu Speech At Burlington, October 9, 1858

 

Lincoln speaking at Burlington

Most people would’ve called it a day after giving a long political speech. Abraham Lincoln gave another one in Burlington.

 

It was Saturday, October 9, 1858. Lincoln was chasing Stephen A. Douglas’s seat in the United States Senate. He’d spent the afternoon speaking in Oquawka, Illinois, before traveling downriver to give Iowans their turn.

 

Burlington Republicans had been trying to get him to town for years. Now they’d finally landed him, and an estimated 1,200 to 1,500 people turned out at Grimes’ Hall to hear him.

 

Lincoln talked for two hours.

 

The Burlington Hawk-Eye didn’t complain. Its October 11 account called the speech “a logical discourse, replete with sound argument, clear, concise and vigorous, earnest, impassioned, and eloquent.”

 

The editor thought Lincoln looked surprisingly fresh after two months on the campaign trail, while Douglas was showing the wear. Unfortunately, the paper gave a review of Lincoln’s speech rather than a transcript. We know how long he spoke and how much the paper enjoyed it, but we’re not sure exactly what he said.

That leaves a tempting hole in the story, but it won’t do to fill it with borrowed Lincoln lines. His Burlington speech came between the Galesburg and Quincy debates, and his words at Quincy help explain the argument he was carrying from town to town.

 

At Quincy, he called slavery “a moral, a social and a political wrong.” Adding, “We also oppose it as an evil so far as it seeks to spread itself.”

 

Those are the words he used at Quincy, not Burlington. Lincoln’s campaign opposed slavery’s expansion, though he maintained that he had no constitutional right to interfere with it in states where it already existed.

 

He stayed in Burlington through Sunday and visited James W. Grimes. A later recollection says he spent about an hour and a half outlining his Quincy speech—the next engagement was already waiting.

Abraham Lincoln speaking with former governor James Grimes

The Grimes Building at Main and Valley streets came down in 1962. The speech is gone, too, but Burlington still has its claim: for two hours on an October evening, Iowa got an earful from a man who’d soon have considerably more on his hands.