When Lincoln Came to Dayton

On Saturday September 17, 1859 future President Abraham Lincoln made his one and only visit to the Gem City. Lincoln was in Dayton on a warm fall afternoon between prearranged stops in Columbus and Cincinnati, where he would meet with citizens, make an address on the steps of the Courthouse, and reportedly find time to have a photograph, now lost to history, taken at a downtown photography studio.

Reemerging after his profile-raising “Lincoln-Douglas” debates with Democratic rival Stephen A. Douglas and his subsequent Illinois Senate loss to the diminutive “Little Giant” the year before, Lincoln was invited to Ohio by Cincinnati and Columbus representatives of the burgeoning Republican Party to speak to citizens in their respective towns.

Douglas, who was gearing up for a presidential run for the Democratic nomination in the 1860 elections, was making his own speaking tour in the electorally significant Buckeye state, which included a stop in Dayton on September 8th, 1859. To counter Douglas and his “popular sovereignty” message of slavery expansion into the western territories, the Republicans invited Lincoln to makes addresses in both Columbus and Cincinnati, where Douglas too would be speaking a week prior. 

Lincoln, still relatively unknown nationally, was possibly angling for a dark-horse presidential run himself, and accepted the invitations to speak in the crucially important state. But he never intended to spend any extended time in Dayton during his “flying trip” to Ohio. In his response to the invitation, he wrote “I shall try and speak at Columbus and Cincinnati, but cannot do more” (letter to Peter Zinn, Sept 6, 1859).

LEFT: A beardless Abraham Lincoln as he would have appeared in 1859. (Historic image courtesy of Dayton Metro Library)
RIGHT: Stephen Douglas circa 1860. Lincoln trailed Douglas to Ohio in what would be an unofficial extension of the Lincoln-Douglas debates from the year before. (Image by Mathew Brady – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain)

Upon learning of Lincoln’s planned visit to Cincinnati from a notice in the pro-Republican Dayton Daily Gazette, the Dayton Republicans were quick to invite Mr. Lincoln to speak in Dayton, recognizing the opportunity with Dayton being a stop along the planned route. Lincoln got the message and had a change of heart, and following his day of speaking in Columbus on Friday, September 16, sent word that evening by telegraph that he would be making an address in Dayton with an announcement: “Hon. Abe Lincoln of Illinois will speak in Dayton at the Courthouse on Saturday at 1½ o’clock.” Although short notice, it was enough time to make the Saturday morning papers. The Dayton Daily Gazette announced, “Slayer of the “Little Giant” will positively address the citizen of Dayton at the Courthouse” (Mr. Lincoln came to Dayton, Lloyd Ostendorf, p. 13).

Lincoln and his party arrived shortly before noon on Saturday at Dayton’s Union Station depot. Lincoln was accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln and Cincinnati Congressman John A. Gurley. A welcome reception was held at the home of prominent Dayton banker Valentine Winters located on the southeast corner of Third and Wilkinson Streets (Ostendorf, p. 15). 

Mr. Winters arranged for the Lincolns to be picked up at the station “sending his negro servant, a former slave named Jerson Anderson, in a spring wagon to the union depot to pick up Mr. Lincoln and his party, and brought them up Wilkinson Street from the station to the corner of Third and Wilkinson.” After briefly addressing members of the reception “under a big flag on the porch,” the Lincoln’s graciously declined an invitation to stay overnight in the Winter’s guest bedroom which offered “a huge walnut bed that would accommodate the tall visitor” (Ostendorf, p. 15-16).

LEFT: Dayton’s Union Station “Round Top” Depot, located at Sixth and Ludlow was constructed in 1856.
RIGHT: The residence of Valentine Winters was built between 1849 and 1850. It was occupied by the Y.W.C.A. in 1891 and later the site of a post office. The former post office building survives today and operates as the US Bankruptcy Court. (Historic images courtesy of Dayton Metro Library)

Next, Lincoln swiftly made his way a few blocks east to the prominent Phillips House, which was located across the street from the courthouse where he would be speaking. There, he made some extemporaneous remarks from the balustrade. The illustrious hotel, located on the southwest corner of Third and Main, was Dayton’s finest hotel. The Lincolns briefly lodged in the presidential suite and lunched, accompanied by the Hon. Robert Schenck and other members of the reception committee (Ostendorf, p. 16).   

Robert C. Schenck (left) of Dayton, who would introduce Lincoln before his remarks at the Courthouse, had befriended Lincoln during their service in Congress together in 1847-48. During Lincoln’s first term as President, Schenck would return to Congress replacing the disgraced Confederate sympathizing Democrat Clement Vallandigham (right) as Dayton’s representative of the Third District. (Historic images courtesy of Dayton Metro Library)

After a quick and light-hearted lunch at the Phillips House which included “wine, jokes, and storytelling”, Lincoln was introduced to prominent Daytonians and invited to honor them by sitting for a picture. With some brief time to spare before his speech, Lincoln obliged and made his was one block east to T.W. Cridland’s photography studio and art gallery located at 244 Third Street, between Jefferson and St. Clair Streets. It is rumored that during the stroll to the photography studio, Lincoln stopped a moment and said a few words to the audience assembled outside Joseph Clegg’s Opera House. Clegg’s Opera House, which was located on Third between Main and Jefferson, would have been in route to Cridland’s studio (Ostendorf, p. 17-18).  

Accounts of Lincoln’s photo shoot are taken from recollections many years later by Cridland’s relatives, but the most exact account is from at the time a 15-year-old aspiring artist and Daytonian named Charles Nickum, who just so happened to be in the studio that day. Relaying his version to the Indianapolis Star roughly 41 years later, Nickum remembered “an awkward man fully 6 feet 4, whose homely face was lighted with kindly eyes that seemed to twinkle sympathy and humor. He removed his hat and stood about, now and then rubbing a hand over his bushy black hair that was inclined to stand up in places, while Judge (Samuel) Craighead arranged for the photographs of himself and guest. I didn’t hear the name at all and never knew his identity until afterwards … he was so long-legged that when he crossed one over the other, both feet seemed to rest on the floor” (Ostendorf, p. 19-20).

As Cridland prepared his camera, Nickum recognized the opportunity for a sketch, and took careful note of Lincoln’s hair, eyes, and complexion.  He recalled Lincoln laughing and telling stories as he patiently waited while posing, and when Lincoln would catch him staring, he would “give me a friendly smile.” It is said Lincoln remarked to the young artist “Keep on, you may make a good one but never a pretty one.” The next day, Nickum painted his portrait based on the photograph that Cridland had made the previous day. Unfortunately, both the Cridland daguerreotype and Nickum’s original sketch have both been lost to history. Cridland’s photo was likely destroyed in an 1865 fire caused by rays of a solar camera in the attic after moving his studio to 12 North Main Street (Ostendorf, p. 20).

In his 1900 interview with the Indianapolis Star, Nickum stated his original portrait was sealed in a box in a bank safety deposit vault, but the original sketch appears to have been lost. However, a photograph of his original sketch was taken. Years later, an oil painting held by Nickum’s widow was thought to be the original sketch and after her death was hung in the Dayton Public Library Museum. That painting was later deemed not to be the September 1859 sketch and instead a photograph of Mathew Brady’s famous 1860 “Cooper Union” photo of Lincoln– taken a year after his Dayton visit–colored over with oil paints, also done by Charles Nickum (Ostendorf, p. 20,21).

LEFT: Clegg’s Hall on Third Street, where Lincoln likely made some remarks, was erected as an opera house in 1852. After the place ceased to be a theater, portions of the building were used as the superior court pending the completion of the new Court House. Eventually, it was turned over to a Jewish organization and then, devoted exclusively to department store purchases. The four-story building suffered fire damages in the late 1940s and was torn down in 1950 and replaced with the Virginia Cafeteria food hall.
RIGHT: This photo shows Main Street, north from Third Street and across the street from the Old Courthouse in 1855. The photo is a painting by John Van Cleve. Cridland moved his studio to this block shortly after Lincoln’s visit where the daguerreotype of Lincoln likely burned in a fire. (Historic images courtesy of Dayton Metro Library)

After the photo shoot, Lincoln headed to the Courthouse for the purpose of his visit. Beginning at about 2:15 pm, a crowd of several hundred people heard Lincoln speak for well over an hour standing upon a box on the curb facing the steps of the Courthouse.   

A word for word account of the speech was never recorded, however a September 19, 1859 Dayton Journal article provides the clearest report available. Lincoln covered much of the same ground as in the preceding speeches at Columbus the day before and added a conclusion which he also used at Cincinnati later that evening (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3., Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865., Speech at Dayton).

In his speech, Lincoln continued to needle Stephen Douglas and his “popular sovereignty” message of slavery expansion into the western territories, a doctrine which held that settlers of a territory would decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. Douglas’s assertion was that settlers residing in these territories—which largely included the northwest quadrant of the continental U.S, which were not yet fully prepared for statehood—should decide the terms under which they would join the Union, primarily applied to the status as free or slave upon drafting their state’s constitution. This idea was first proposed by Douglas in his authorship of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory.

Lincoln opposed this doctrine, specifically any expansion of slavery, and sought to prove that from the very founding the idea of slavery was meant to be contained, not expanded. He began his speech expounding upon the history of the U.S. founding and how the framers of the government “found slavery existing when the constitution was formed, and got along with it as well as they could in accomplishing the Union of the States, contemplating and expecting the advent of the period when slavery in the United States should no longer exist,” and that “the framers of our government regarded the removal of slavery as only a question of time, and that at some day, not far distant, the people among whom it existed would get rid of it” (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3).

Lincoln reminded the crowd that the word slavery does not appear in the Constitution as such “no one should know from the language of the constitution itself, that slavery had ever existed in the United States.” He spoke of the difficulty of removing slavery once it gained a foothold and the trouble of forming a free constitution in the territory where slaves were already held as property (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3).

LEFT: The Old Court House where Lincoln gave his address. A stately limestone building constructed only nine years before in 1850 represents a fine example of Greek Revival architecture, and is still standing today at the northwest corner of Third and Main.
RIGHT: The Phillips Hotel, built in 1852, was Dayton’s most illustrious hotel where the Lincoln’s lodged. After years of small fires and damages from the 1913 flood—which in turn consumed any prospective record of Lincoln’s visit—was razed in 1926 after 72 years of service. (Historic images courtesy of Dayton Metro Library)

The September 19, 1859 account of the speech from the pro-Republican Dayton Daily Gazette described the main line of his arguments being “the whole history of the government, from the enactment of the Ordinance of 1787 (which governed the federal territories as described above) to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, showed that the policy of the government was averse to the extension of slavery; that this was evinced in the limitation of the African Slave Trade in the year 1808, and in the endorsement of the anti-slavery principles of the 1787 Ordinance under the administration of Washington” (Ostendorf, p. 28-29).

Lincoln then previewed a crux of his Cincinnati speech he was to give later that evening. He contended that the soil and climate of Ohio was just as favorable to slave labor as was the soil and climate in Kentucky, and yet without the Ordinance of 1787, Kentucky was made a slave state, while Ohio was to become free. Lincoln attributed the Ordinance’s prohibition of the ingress of slaves in the Northwest territories (of which Ohio was a part of) as the reason to relieve the question altogether of Ohio being either a free state or slave state upon the formation of statehood, not because of the “popular sovereignty” of Ohio’s settlers, as Douglas would contend (Ostendorf, p. 26-27).

Lincoln closed his speech with some remarks defending the rights of free labor stating “The free white men had a right to claim that the new territories into which they and their children might go to seek a livelihood should be preserved free and clear of the incumbrance of slavery, and that no laboring white man should be placed in a position where, by the introduction of slavery into the territories, he would be compelled to toil by the side of a slave” (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3).

At those close of his speech, three cheers were given for Mr. Lincoln. After a few closing remarks by Congressman Gurley, they made there way across the street back to the Phillips House where Mrs. Lincoln was awaiting and quickly made there way back to the union depot to make the four o’clock train to Cincinnati. Before arriving in Cincinnati, a short stop was made in Hamilton where Lincoln is said to have remarked “This beautiful and far-framed Miami Valley is the garden spot of the world” (Ostendorf, p. 30-31).