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Although Abraham Lincoln's home was in Indiana from the age of seven until shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Hoosiers have long complained that their state is unfairly neglected compared to Kentucky and Illinois where Lincoln is concerned; see Keith A. Erekson's amusing "Losing Lincoln: A Call to Commemorative Action" in the December 2009 *Indiana Magazine of History.* http://scholarworks.iu.edu/…/i…/imh/article/view/12446/18599 ("Four score and seven years ago, our Indiana fathers brought forth, within this state, a new rivalry, conceived in necessity, and dedicated to the proposition that neighboring states--specifically Kentucky and Illinois--were not treating Hoosiers as equal. For nearly a century and a half, Hoosiers have generally lost the struggle to claim Lincoln as a representative of their state...")

Here I would like to ask: What if Thomas Lincoln had decided not to move from Indiana to Illinois? Of course Abraham might decide eventually to move to Illinois by himself, but suppose he doesn't? (Even if he was anxious to leave his father--he could not have helped but notice that his father was less intelligent and ambitious than himself, and as David Donald remarks, nowhere in any of Lincoln's writings or recollected speech does he have one favorable word to say about his father--he might move to somewhere else in Indiana.) Does Hoosier Abe Lincoln eventually enter politics, and if so with how much success? As Erekson notes, the young Lincoln was in some ways a typical Hoosier frontier boy, yet in other ways a bit unusual: "It is time to note that Lincoln was not superhuman, merely a 'typical' frontier boy. His mother died, but one in every four children on the frontier lost a parent before age 15, and half of all America's sitting nineteenth-century presidents had lost one or both parents.20 We should stop claiming extraordinary things from the Hoosier Lincoln and instead hold a sophisticated conversation about the fact that though he was typical, he was also 'odd'--rejecting such pastimes as hunting and tobacco, becoming a Whig, and desiring all of his life to put his Indiana past behind him." (This last point is I suppose an argument that Lincoln would have eventually moved out of Indiana, anyway, whatever his father did.) Erekson also points out that "Lincoln's great religious contradiction--though he joined no Christian church, he still brought the Bible dramatically and effectively into his speeches and policy--began in Indiana. Here he read the Bible but did not join the Baptist church; here he mocked organized religion by satirizing circuit preachers; and here too, in the recent words of historian Stewart Winger, he laid the core of his 'romantic cultural politics.'"

If the Hoosier Lincoln does eventually decide to go into politics, it will presumably be the same kind as in Illinois--a moderately anti-slavery Whig. This was of course a minority position in both these states: the frontier--and especially the frontier areas that were at first settled more by Southerners than Northeners--tended to be Democratic and Negrophobic, and it is no wonder that Lincoln had plenty of political failures as well as successes in Illinois. Yet if anything the Whigs were slightly stronger in Indiana than Illinois, and the presence of a large number of anti-war Quakers in southern Indiana might make criticism of the Mexican War less politically harmful in Indiana than it was in Illinois. OTOH, at least in Illinois the explosive growth of Chicago would eventually counterbalance the "southernness" of much of the rest of the state; Indiana too received an increasing number of Yankees but not to the same extent.

Anyway, one problem Lincoln would have if he became a Whig/Republican politician in Indiana: The Indiana "fusion" or "People's Party" (the "anti-Nebraska" movment that emerged in 1854--they didn't use the word "Republican" yet because it sounded too "radical") was, especially in its early days, *very* heavily influenced by Know Nothings. One historian writes, "In Indiana as elsewhere there was a movement for a Fusion or People's party. The Know Nothings, perhaps the strongest of all the elements of the opposition but not strong enough to run a ticket of their own, determined to act with the Fusionists, to control the whole movement and to direct it in their own interests. In this they were merely following the usage of their brethren in the eastern states when the party was weak there. As a result their program was carried out with astonishing success, for during the entire canvass of 1854 the invisible machinery of Know Nothingism governed the Fusion movement—its nominations, its active organization and its campaign." https://books.google.com/books?pg=R...MsGyyAStsIDQBg&id=Q3YfAQAAMAAJ&ots=ZfyWlhAShu This fact was often used against Schuyler Colfax in his later political career (even though he denied ever joining the Order) and presumably would be used against Lincoln as well...
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