Beschreibung:

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, President . Autograph manuscript, THE PERORATION OR CONCLUDING PORTION OF A SPEECH, prepared during the 1858 campaign for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas which culminated in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, one word corrected and two words inserted by Lincoln, n.p., n.d. [Springfield, Illinois, c. July 1858?]. 1 1/4 pages, folio, 320 x 204mm. (12 5/8 x 8 7/16 in.), 37 lines (167 words) written in dark brown ink on rectos only of two sheets of heavy wove paper (no watermark), left-hand margins of each sheet with three printed rules (one blue flanked by two red), almost imperceptible soiling at left-hand portion (perhaps where it was held during the speech by the speaker?), otherwise in very fine condition. Dark blue crushed levant morocco protective case, cover with gilt roll-tooled borders, upper cover lettered in gold "Notes on Abolition Abraham Lincoln." "IN THE REPUBLICAN CAUSE THERE IS A HIGHER AIM THAN THAT OF MERE OFFICE...THE HIGHER OBJECT OF THIS CONTEST MAY NOT BE COMPLETELY ATTAINED WITHIN THE TERM OF MY NATURAL LIFE": LINCOLN'S PERORATION FROM A SPEECH, PREDICTING A "GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION": THE ABOLITION OF THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY A remarkable manuscript, once part of the Lincoln papers, which dates from a pivotal period during the political ascension of Abraham Lincoln. Previously described as a fragment, it is complete in itself and may be identified by its oratorical tone and pacing, textual parallels with other addresses and by its physical arrangement on the paper as the peroration, or rhetorical summation, from an unidentified speech. (Only one other Lincoln peroration from this, the Lincoln-Douglas contest, is extant in manuscript form: that of Lincoln's 30 October 1858 address, also a two-page fragment; see Collected Works , ed. R.P. Basler, 3:334). Robert Todd Lincoln's testimony (see Provenance below) that his father wrote this manuscript in 1858 is persuasive; the editors of Lincoln's work date it, more precisely, about July 1858. That places the present manuscript in a crucial period when Lincoln was actively preparing for his famous contest with Stephen A. Douglas for one of two Illinois Senate seats. This strenuous oratorical duel between two superb stump speakers constituted "Lincoln's most important political speaking, without which he probably never would have become president" (Waldo W. Braden, Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker, 1988, p. 19). The profound historical implications of the Lincoln-Douglas clash, which attracted national attention, need no elaboration here. Although in the end Lincoln failed by a narrow margin to unseat the incumbent Douglas, his resolute forensic attack on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which permitted the expansion of slavery into the territories), his ringing moral indictment of the institution of slavery and his impassioned oratory catapulted him to national prominence. As one historian has written: "In retrospect, the tall form of Lincoln dominates the scene...The momentum gathered in their contest...carried both Lincoln and Douglas to the threshold of the White House, but only one could enter" (Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s, 1962, pp. 96, 120). Lincoln writes: "I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station; and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous. Yet I have never failed -- do not now fail -- to remember that in the republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office. I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade by Great Brittain [ sic ], was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success; that the measure had its open fire-eating opponents; its stealthy 'don't care' opponents; its dollar and cents opponents; its inferior race opponents; its negro equality opponents; and its religion and good order opponents; that all these got offices, and their adversaries got none. But I have also remembered that though they blaze