… That the issue of slavery almost made Lincoln ungovernable?
During the early 1800s, Lincoln was pretty much a Whig town. Time after time, it voted overwhelmingly for the Whig’s presidential candidate, who then lost to the candidate of the Jacksonian Democratic party.
But the election of 1848 was different. The Whig party had been ambivalent about whether slavery should be allowed in the new territories of the southwest acquired during the Mexican‑American War. That sparked the rise of a new Free Soil party, adamantly opposed to the extension of slavery. In the 1848 election for president, Lincoln’s voters split with fifty-two votes for Zachary Taylor of the Whig party and fifty votes for Martin Van Buren of the Free Soil party. (Another twelve votes went to the Democratic candidate.)
Whatever views Lincoln’s Whig voters had about slavery, for some, those views were overridden by distaste for former-President Martin Van Buren, with his long history as a Jacksonian Democrat. Abel Hartwell, for one, loudly asserted “he never did vote for Van Buren and he never would, and he would not vote for a man that would vote for Van Buren.”
Charles Frances Adams was Vice-President on the Free Soil ticket in 1848 with Martin Van Buren. His son was later a resident of Lincoln
The town’s political divisions carried over to Lincoln’s town meeting in March 1849. It took seven ballots to choose the three selectmen. Then one of those chosen—Abel Wheeler—refused to serve. Two more ballots were needed before Dr. Henry Chapin was elected to fill that spot. Two days later, Dr. Chapin resigned. Six more ballots were needed before William Wheeler was elected and agreed to serve. The tangle had delayed the election of other minor town officers, and it was days before a town treasurer was finally selected.
James L. Chapin, who attended the seemingly endless meetings, lamented the political paralysis: “We are a strange set of people here in Lincoln—always quarreling about something. We have two parties, and if one of them attempts to do anything, the other is sure to oppose them to the last.”
In the next two presidential elections, Lincoln voters would again side with the (losing) Whig candidates, General Winfield Scott in 1852 and Millard Filmore in 1856. Finally, in 1860, the town of Lincoln voted in a landslide for a winning presidential candidate—a rough-hewn man from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.
For more on Lincoln’s divisive politics in the era before the Civil War, see Jack MacLean’s A Rich Harvest. On the disappearance of the Black community of Lincoln in the early 19th century, see Donald L. Hafner, Entangled Lives, Black and White: The Black Community, Enslaved and Free, in 18th Century Lincoln. Both are available from the Lincoln Historical Society Bookstore.
Donald L. Hafner
The Lincoln Historical Society
February 2022
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