On the night of September 20, 1848, “a capital specimen of a ‘Sucker’ Whig, six feet at least in his stockings,” gave a speech in Cambridge City Hall in favor of the Whig candidates for president and vice president, General Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Boston Atlas). “Sucker” seems to have been a general term at the time for a Midwesterner, although its origin is unclear. 1
This Sucker Whig was the Representative from Illinois, the Honorable Abraham Lincoln. He had attended the state Whig Convention in Worcester on the 13th and delivered campaign speeches in Worcester, Lowell, Dorchester, and Chelsea. On the morning of the 20th, he spoke in Dedham.
After having run a successful race for the train departing Dedham, Lincoln returned to the Boston and Providence Railroad depot near Boston Common, arriving in the early evening. He walked across the city to the station of the Fitchburg Railroad on Causeway Street [now North Station] to catch another train. This one took him in a westerly direction, across the Charles River to Cambridge. 2
The Fitchburg Railroad crossed Miller’s Creek (north of East Cambridge), then ran through Somerville to North Cambridge (and beyond). Lincoln would have alighted at one of three stations: two in Somerville, Prospect Street or Somerville (also called Park Street) stations in Somerville and one in Cambridge, Porter Station in North Cambridge (in the same location as today’s). From there, he would have walked.
A lively crowd of local Whigs (and a few reporters) awaited Mr. Lincoln at City Hall, then a simple wood building at the corner of Norfolk and Harvard streets completed 1832 (now site of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church).
A committee of prominent citizens studied the matter of a townhouse carefully and in March 1831 recommended that it should be erected in Cambridgeport, “as more central to the populations of the town than the present house [in Harvard Square].”
The house is to be of wood, forty-six feet in front or breadth, and seventy-six feet long, with posts twenty feet and four inches high, and the roof one fourth of its base in height; on each end of the building, in addition to the aforesaid length, will be a portico, of six feet in width, consisting of six fluted Doric columns, with an entablature and pediment. 3
The town hired Asher Benjamin, a skilled housewright-turned-architect, to design the building in the Greek Revival style then considered suitable for houses of government. (Benjamin published a series of pattern books for ordinary builders. Each included a primer on architectural history and style elements, as well as complete house plans and measured drawings of circular staircases, mantlepieces, fences, and the like.) The town house cost $4,351.19, including furniture and fencing, the first town meeting was held there in March 1832. It burned down on 29 December 1853.
Local newspapers did not print the text of Lincoln’s Cambridge speech on September 20th, nor have letters or diaries written by those in attendance been found, but a reporter for the Boston Atlas, a Whig newspaper, wrote about the rally enthusiastically.
A sudden shower had descended just before the meeting began, but it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the Whigs present. It was one of those old-fashioned Whig gatherings, which it does a true Whig good to witness. … when the Old Cambridge [Zachary] Taylor Club entered the hall with a splendid band of music, and were received with cheer upon cheer, until the rafters shook and the roof rang, it seemed as if the building could not possibly contain the numbers who thronged to enter it. [The speech was] plain, direct, convincing … a model speech for the campaign. 4
Since there was no late train from Cambridge, Mr. Lincoln had to return to his rooms in Boston’s Tremont House by carriage or on foot.
Lincoln made one or two more speeches locally and left for Illinois on September 23, 1848.
Taylor and Fillmore won the election.
1 Sucker Whig: A commenter on an etymology blog noted that people from Illinois used to be called suckers in some neighboring states, perhaps, as another writer speculated, because Illinois men used to travel up the Mississippi River each spring to work and return home in the fall—Missourians called them “suckers” after a common fish that migrated in the same fashion. The Whigs took their name from those Revolutionary American Whigs who had opposed tyranny; this party, formed ca. 1834 in opposition to the authoritarian policies of Andrew Jackson and his Democrats, supported Congressional over presidential power and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism. In 1854, most Northern Whigs joined the newly formed Republican Party.
2 Abraham Lincoln Among the Yankees: Abraham Lincoln’s 1848 Visit to Massachusetts by William F. Hanna (Old Colony Historical Society, Taunton, Mass. 1983)
3 The History of Cambridge, Massachusetts by Lucius R. Paige 1877
4 Hanna
