September 17, 1859 was a warm, sultry Saturday night in Cincinnati. Drummers played. Rockets glared reddish-yellow above Fifth Street residences. A Union flag waved above the Fifth Street Market House. Youngsters fed several bonfires to light the night for a crowd of over 4,000 who gazed at a man speaking from a 2^nd floor balcony.

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois spoke from a building on the north side of the street where the Federal Courthouse stands. Earnest and, at time, humorous, Lincoln spoke against the expansion of slavery.

Reverend Moncure Conway was used to political gatherings. This one was a campaign specifically for Cincinnati attorney William Dennison who was running for Governor. Yet there was something compelling about Lincoln. He said that slavery was wrong. In that border city where slavery was legal across the Ohio River into Kentucky, a few folks in the crowd hissed their disapproval.

Lincoln waited for outbursts to subside a little. Then he replied that everyone was born with two hands and a mouth to be fed and he inferred it was the job of those two hands to feed that mouth.

The Republicans didn’t ask Lincoln to be their nominee until six months later on May 23, 1860. When someone in the Cincinnati crowd asked who Lincoln recommended they vote for, he didn’t have a choice for candidate. His advice was to vote for a man who’d fight slavery’s expansion.

Front-Porch Campaigns of the era preferred that presidential candidates allow the Republican Party to give their message to citizens.

Seventeen months later on February 18, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington, was back in Cincinnati. City buildings were decorated in red, white, and blue bunting. Wearing black with a gray shawl over his shoulders, Lincoln smiled at the train station’s enthusiastic crowd. Cannons boomed in welcome on his procession to center of the city. Young girls sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail Columbia.” Officials made patriotic speeches. He went to Cincinnati’s Burnet House while there but it’s not clear where these speeches were made.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

Tucker, Louis Leonard. Cincinnati during the Civil War, Ohio State University Press, 1962.

Wimberg, Robert J. Cincinnati and the Civil War: Off to Battle, Ohio Book Store, 1992.

“With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition,” Library of Congress Exhibitions, 2019/04/01 https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lincoln/the-run-for-president.html.