AL to Ichabod Codding:
Ichabod Codding, a Congregational clergyman, temperance advocate, and peripatetic abolitionist, lectured throughout the Midwest. He spent most of his time in Illinois, helping to organize Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Whigs, and political abolitionists into what would become the Republican Party. On October 4 in Springfield, he heard Lincoln denounce Stephen A. Douglas's notion of popular sovereignty and defenders of slavery as “political hypocrites before the world.” Codding became convinced that he had found a new leader for the Republicans. He and his fellow abolitionist Owen Lovejoy invited Lincoln to future Republican conventions and named him to their state central committee. Lincoln, however, remained committed to the Whig Party and did not want to be associated with the abolitionists, who he believed played too public a role in organizing the new party. He had shrewdly presented himself as a Unionist, rejecting Douglas's assertion that the Compromise of 1850 had abrogated the Compromise of 1820, which barred the expansion of slavery into the territories. But to Codding and Lovejoy, Lincoln appeared to have delivered a “glorious abolition speech” at Springfield. Mindful of the direction of state and national politics, Lincoln informed Codding that his opposition to slavery was as strong as anyone's in the new party, but he would never assert that opposition as strongly as did the clergyman and his associates. For Lincoln's desire to distance himself from abolitionists, see: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 177–180.