Abraham Lincoln made three visits to Rhode Island. The first was short and inconsequential. In September 1848, Lincoln attended the Whig party's convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. After making a speech in Worcester on behalf of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate in the coming presidential election, Lincoln traveled by train to New Bedford. En route, Lincoln changed trains in Providence.

Lincoln's second and third trips to the Ocean State took place ten days apart during the late winter of 1860. In February of that year, Lincoln traveled from Illinois to New York to deliver an address at the Cooper Institute in Manhattan. Two years earlier, Lincoln, a Midwesterner with limited experience in national politics, had challenged incumbent Stephen Douglas for his Illinois senate seat. Lincoln lost, but the Lincoln-Douglas campaign attracted national attention, marking Lincoln as an up-and-coming figure in the Republican Party. The East Coast Republicans invited Lincoln to speak on the most compelling issue of the day: slavery. On February 27 at the Cooper Institute, Lincoln, who was already considering a presidential run in 1860, gave a rousing oration, defending his party's position against the extension of slavery and arguing that slavery was not explicitly defended by the U.S. Constitution.

The day after the Cooper address, Lincoln boarded a train with John Eddy, a Providence attorney and influential Rhode Island Republican. Eddy had recruited Lincoln to deliver an address in Providence on February 28. After the eight-hour train ride, Lincoln visited Eddy's home on Washington Street in Providence for dinner. (The home no longer exists.) Later that evening, Lincoln, who was relatively unknown in the Ocean State, gave a speech to a large crowd assembled in Railroad Hall, the large second-floor auditorium of the Union Passenger Depot. (The depot, which burned in the 1890s, resided in today's Kennedy Plaza.)

No transcript exists of Lincoln two-and-a-half-hour speech at Railroad Hall, but newspaper accounts of the day suggest that Lincoln repeated in Providence many of the same points that he had made the day before at the Cooper Institute. Newspaper editors gave Lincoln's oration mixed reviews. The Republican-leaning Providence Daily Journal praised Lincoln's honesty, cogency, and wit. The conservative Democratic Providence Daily Post called Lincoln "tender-footed" on the slavery question.

After spending the night at the Eddy home, Lincoln, on the morning of February 29, boarded a train for New Hampshire to visit his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy. After delivering speeches in New Hampshire and in Connecticut, Lincoln returned to Rhode Island on March 8 to deliver an address in Woonsocket. Lincoln's hosts in Woonsocket were Latimer Ballou, a founder of the Rhode Island Republican party, and Edward Harris, a Woonsocket wool mill owner who had built Harris Institute and Harris Hall, where Lincoln would speak. (The building is now Woonsocket City Hall.) The speech was not recorded, but accounts of the event suggest that Lincoln again hammered home the arguments made in the Cooper address. The next day, March 9, Lincoln boarded a train and headed home to Illinois.

The two Rhode Island addresses in February and March of 1860 were part of an eastern campaign swing that propelled Lincoln to the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention in Chicago in May. Lincoln's trip to New York and New England convinced eastern Republicans that a relatively unknown Midwesterner was a serious national candidate who could win the presidency in the election of 1860.


Source: Williams, Frank J. "A Candidate Speaks in Rhode Island: Abraham Lincoln Visits Providence and Woonsocket, 1860." Rhode Island History 51.4 (November 1993): 107-19.
 

Abraham Lincoln Rhode Island Factoids

• After Abraham Lincoln's speech at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it," Lincoln essentially gave the same speech on February 28, 1860 at the overflowing Railroad Hall in Providence located where the federal courthouse is now.

• Lincoln stayed the night with John Eddy, a prominent Republican at his home, 265 Washington Street, Providence.

• On March 8, 1860, Lincoln delivered his speech at Harris Institute Hall, 157 Main Street, Woonsocket, a building still standing as part of the Woonsocket City Hall.

• On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln is sworn in as the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln carried Rhode Island 12,244 to 7,704 for Stephen A. Douglas.

• On April 12, 1861, the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, began the Civil War.

• On April 15, 1861, President Lincoln issued his first proclamation for 75,000 three-months troops.

• On April 16, 1861, Rhode Island Governor William Sprague responded to the call by offering, in addition to the state's quota of one infantry regiment, one battery of light artillery. The War Department accepted the offer and the units received the official designation of 1st Regiment, Rhode Island Detached Militia and 1st Light Battery, Rhode Island Volunteers.

• On May 7, 1861, the Battery was mustered into the service of the United States.

• The next day, the detachment of the 1st Regiment, Infantry, under Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside, left for Washington. The 2nd Detachment led by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph S. Pitman left the city four days later. The Regiment and Battery were temporarily quartered at the Patent Office in Washington until Camp Sprague, a mile north of the Capital, was opened to the Rhode Islanders on May 18.

• In 1864, Lincoln carried Rhode Island 14,343 to 8,718 for Major General George B. McClellan.

• 23,699 Rhode Islanders enter Lincoln's call for service in the Union Army and Navy, more proportionately than any other state.