Encounters
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A leading promoter of that enterprise, Francis Arnez, edited the Beardstown Chronicle, whose columns in November 1834 contained a slashing attack on Peter Cart-wright, a prominent Methodist minister and Jacksonian politico. Though signed “Sam Hill,” the piece was actually written by Lincoln, who sent it to Arnez after the Sangamo Journal had rejected it. (Arnez agreed to run it only as a paid advertisement.) The irascible, vindictive Hill, known as “the rich man of the village” and “the potentate” with “a peculiar temper” so explosive that he could not drive a carriage team, had been quarreling with the belligerent Cartwright, who lived 6 miles from New Salem in Pleasant Plains. During an earlier squabble with Jack Armstrong, Hill had hired someone to thrash that leader of the Clary’s Grove boys. Now he employed Lincoln to attack Cart-wright with a pen rather than fists. Lincoln had no special fondness for Cartwright, one of the four candidates who had beaten him out for a legislative seat in 1832. Lincoln’s inflammatory 1,500-word philippic, dated September 7, 1834, accused Cartwright of being “a most abondoned hypocrite” and concluded that it was hard to tell whether he “is [a] greater fool or knave” and that “he has but few rivals in either capacity.” (The attack was clever but unfair, based on a misreading of Cartwright’s writings.) Thus began a pattern of anonymous and pseudonymous journalistic assaults that did Lincoln little credit. (He would quit that ugly practice in 1842, when an offended target of his ridicule challenged him to a duel, an episode discussed in chapter 6.)
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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The president’s message contained a stern ultimatum. As one journalist noted, “Mr. Lincoln has at last determined to tender peaceable and friendly emancipation to the slaveholders if they will have it, and forcible emancipation if they will not.” This reporter thought that “Mr. Lincoln has determined to shake off the Kentucky nightmare and be himself again” now that the Border States seemed unlikely to secede. Many believed that the president “has been reserving this shot for the contingency which had now been brought about and that it was his intention from the beginning, after securing so much ground, to put his views of the incompatibility of slavery and freedom into practical operation.” The Chicago Tribune’s editors calculated that “the Free States are unanimous in adhering to the emancipation idea” and that “the President has struck the key-note with which full twenty millions of people will accord.” In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican called the message “a coup d’etat, in fact, displaying much sagacity in its inception, significant in its aim and purpose, and likely to be most important in its effects.” An antislavery militant in Connecticut, Elihu Burritt, wrote Lincoln that the “whole civilized world is honoring you with its sincere homage, as the first of all the list of American Presidents that ever had the moral courage to propose a plan for the extinction of Slavery, so just, generous and noble as to be hailed with admiration in both hemispheres. No earthly potentate ought to aspire to a higher glory than that which this magnanimous overture will forever attach to your name.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
Link to original