contest resulted in a drawn battle.  The American party held together with tolerable firmness in its vote for President, but was largely disintegrated in its vote on the ticket for State officers.  The consequence was that Illinois gave a plurality of 9164 for Buchanan, the Democratic candidate for President, while at the same time it gave a plurality of 4729 for Bissell, the Republican candidate for Governor.[5]

Half victory as it was, it furnished the Illinois Republicans a substantial hope of the full triumph which they achieved four years later.  About a month after this election, at a Republican banquet given in Chicago on the 10th of December, 1856, Abraham Lincoln spoke as follows, partly in criticism of the last annual message of President Pierce, but more especially pointing out the rising star of promise: 

We have another annual presidential message.  Like a rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President felicitates himself hugely over the late presidential election.  He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones.  He says the people did it.  He forgets that the “people,” as he complacently calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the whole people by about four hundred thousand votes—­one full tenth of all the votes.  Remembering this, he might perceive that the “rebuke” may not be quite as durable as he seems to think—­that the majority may not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority.

The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and designing men.  There is a slight difference of opinion on this.  We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had liberty every way.  He is the cat’s-paw.  By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use.  As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out-of-doors, “He’s a shelled peascod.” [That’s a sheal’d peascod.]

So far as the President charges us “with a desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States,” and of “doing everything in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority,” for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.

  [Sidenote] Illinois “State Journal,” December 16, 1856.