Lincoln’s Lost Speech

 

 

Most orations of historical figures are lost to us if they lived prior to the Nineteenth Century.  Usually we have summaries or reports of speeches, but the exact words are often lost.  Even in the Nineteenth Century, with the advent of mass papers and stenographic reports, many speeches of even major figures are lost to us.  So was the case with Abraham Lincoln, with his most famous lost speech being a stem winder of an attack on slavery that he made on May 29, 1856 at an anti-Nebraska convention that ended with the founding of the Republican party in Illinois.  Lincoln spoke for ninety minutes denouncing slavery, and calling on the creation of a Republican party in Illinois to do battle against the advocates of slavery.  His speech was frequently interrupted with cheers and standing ovations as Lincoln deeply moved his audience.

Other than very brief summaries in the press, the speech is completely lost, which is rather odd.  The convention was attended by representatives of the press, and Lincoln usually prepared his speeches in writing beforehand, although he was a master of revising them on the fly as he spoke.

In 1896 Chicago attorney Henry Clay Whitney wrote an article that he claimed contained the text of the speech from his notes that he took at the time.  Lincoln’s former secretary John Nicolay immediately denounced the text as a fraud, devoid completely of Lincoln’s style, and almost all historians have shared his conviction that Whitney made his text up.

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