Towards the Presidency
In 1846 Lincoln was elected to one term in the House of 
Representatives as a member of the United States Whig Party. A 
staunch Whig, Lincoln often referred to Whig leader Henry Clay 
as his political idol. As a freshman House member, Lincoln was 
not a particularly powerful or influential figure in Congress. 
He used his office as an opportunity to speak out against the 
war with Mexico, which he attributed to President Polk's desire 
for "military glory -- that attractive rainbow, that rises in 
showers of blood."

Lincoln was a key early supporter of Zachary Taylor's candidacy 
for the 1848 Whig Presidential nomination. When his term ended, 
the incoming Taylor administration offered him the governorship 
of the Oregon Territory. He declined, returning instead to 
Springfield, Illinois where, although remaining active in Whig 
Party affairs in the state, he turned most of his energies to 
making a living at the bar. By the mid-1850s, Lincoln had 
acquired prominence in Illinois legal circles, especially through 
his involvement in litigation involving competing transportation 
interests — both the river barges and the railroads.

Lincoln represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad, for example, 
in an 1851 dispute with one of its shareholders, James A. 
Barret. Barret had refused to pay the balance on his pledge to 
that corporation on the ground that it had changed its originally 
planned route. Lincoln argued that as a matter of law a 
corporation is not bound by its original charter when that 
charter can be amended in the public interest, that the newer 
proposed Alton & Sangamon route was superior and less expensive, 
and that accordingly the corporation had a right to sue Mr. 
Barret for his delinquent payment. He won this case, and the 
decision by the Illinois Supreme Court was eventually cited by 
several other courts throughout the United States.

Another important example of Lincoln's skills as a railroad 
lawyer was a lawsuit over a tax exemption that the state granted 
to the Illinois Central Railroad. McLean County argued that the 
state had no authority to grant such an exemption, and it 
sought to impose taxes on the railroad notwithstanding. In 
January 1856, the Illinois Supreme Court delivered its opinion 
upholding the tax exemption, accepting Lincoln's arguments.

In addition, Lincoln worked in at least one criminal trial in 
1857 when he defended William "Duff" Armstrong pro bono who 
was on trial for the murder of James Preston Metzker. The case 
is famous for when Lincoln used judicial notice, a rare 
tactic at that time, to show an eyewitness perjured himself 
on the stand claiming he witnessed the crime in the moonlight. 
Lincoln produced a Farmer's Almanac to show that the moon on 
that date was at a low angle and could not have produced enough 
lumination for the witness to see anything clearly. Based on 
this evidence, Armstrong was acquitted.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which expressly repealed the 
limits on slavery's spread that had been part of the Missouri 
Compromise of 1820, helped draw Lincoln back into electoral 
politics. It was a speech against Kansas-Nebraska, on October 
16, 1854 in Peoria, that caused Lincoln to stand out among 
the other free-soil orators of the day. During his unsuccessful 
1858 campaign for the United States Senate against Democrat 
Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln debated Douglas in a series of 
events which became a national discussion on the issues that 
were about to split the nation in two. Douglas, proposing 
popular sovereignty as the solution to the slavery impasse, 
had sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. During the 
debates, Lincoln forced Douglas to propose instead his Freeport 
Doctrine, which lost him further support among slave-holders. 
Though the Illinois state legislature chose Douglas as U.S. 
senator (this was before the 17th Amendment), Lincoln's eloquence 
during the campaign transformed him into a national political 
star.


Election and Early Presidency
As the campaign for the Presidential election of 1860 began, many 
eastern Republicans urged support for Douglas, since he was a 
national leader who had led the opposition to the Buchanan 
administration's push for the Lecompton Constitution which would 
have admitted Kansas as a slave state. However, Lincoln's eloquence 
in debating Douglas and during the campaign transformed him into 
a political star and he was chosen as the Republican candidate 
because his views on slavery were more moderate than those of 
the Radical Republicans. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was 
elected as the 16th President of the United States, beating 
Douglas and two other major candidates. Lincoln was the first 
Republican president. Lincoln won entirely on the strength of 
his support in the North: he received no votes in nine states 
in the South - he was not even on the ballot in some of them - 
and won only 2 of 996 counties in the entire South. Even before 
Lincoln's election, leaders in the South made it clear that 
their States would secede in response to a Lincoln victory. 
A total of seven slave states left the Union before Lincoln 
took office, forming the Confederate States of America.

President-elect Lincoln survived an assassination attempt in 
Baltimore, Maryland, and on February 23, 1861 arrived secretly 
in disguise to Washington, DC. Southerners ridiculed Lincoln 
for this subterfuge, but the efforts at security may have been 
prudent. At Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, the 
Turners formed Lincoln's bodyguard; and a sizable garrison 
of federal troops was also present, ready to protect the 
president and the capital from rebel invasion. In his First 
Inaugural Address, Lincoln declared, "I hold that in 
contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the 
Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, 
if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national 
governments", arguing further that the purpose of the 
Constitution was "to form a more perfect union" than the 
Articles of Confederation which were explicitly perpetual, 
and thus the Constitution too was perpetual. He asked 
rhetorically that even were the Constitution construed as a 
simple contract, would it not require the agreement of all 
parties to rescind it? He also endorsed an amendment (which 
had already passed both houses) protecting slavery in those 
states in which it already existed. After Union troops at 
Fort Sumter were fired on and forced to surrender in April, 
Lincoln called for more troops from each remaining state to 
recapture forts and preserve the Union. In response, four more 
slave states seceded by May 1861, and splinter factions from 
Missouri and Kentucky joined the Confederacy by December.