A legacy of which to be proud

Old Main, Knox College

Knox College, whom we play tomorrow at 1pm, is a small little school in a small little town. But both the school and the town have an outsize importance in our state's and ultimately the nation's, history. 

Knox was established by religious evangelists/social reformers, lead by George Washington Gale, in 1837. Many of the founders were active in the Underground Railroad and all of them believed that access to education should not be restricted by financial means, sex, or race. So from the beginning Knox was open to both women and students of color, which is pretty progressive thinking 25 years before the Civil War.

Galesburg, IL, which was established at the same time as the college by G.W. Gale, is nestled in northwestern Illinois near Iowa. It was home to the first anti-slavery society in the state and was a stop on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves.

 In 1858, a previously little-known circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was running for the United States Senate against the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a Democrat who had earned the nickname "Little Giant"* because although he was quite short, he was a forceful speaker and a dominant figure in politics. Lincoln was running as a Republican, a party that had just recently been established in Ripon, WI, a primary plank of their platform being that slavery should not spread beyond its current borders.**

The man who stole Holly's nickname

*Is it me, or is the Little Giant not a PERFECT nickname for our own Holly Lesperance? 

**For more detail on this please see this post from our trip to Ripon College last season.

Two years before the Civil War these two candidates met seven times all over the state in a series of intense debates, now known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. One candidate would speak for 60 minutes, then the other for 90 minutes, and then the first would have 30 minutes to reply. On October 7, 1858, they met at Knox College, on a temporary stage outside their Old Main classroom building*, where Douglas publicly stated that the Declaration of Independence was not meant to apply to non-whites. "The Government was made by our fathers on the white basis...made by white men for the benefit of white men and their prosperity forever." Lincoln, on the other hand, perhaps comforted by the abolitionist spirit of Knox College and Galesburg, took the opportunity to announce for the first time, his moral opposition to the institution of slavery.

*I have heard a story that while Lincoln was preparing himself in the basement of Old Main just prior to the debate he was accidentally locked in and the 6' 4" future president had to crawl out a small basement window before taking the stage. I couldn't find any evidence online that this actually happened.

Lincoln lost that election to the Senate. But of course, in 1860, his election to another, higher office would change the course of the nation.

Two years after the debates, during that Presidential campaign, Lincoln was awarded the first honorary doctorate ever conferred by Knox College, a Doctor of Laws degree, that was announced at the July 5, 1860 commencement exercises. 145 years later, almost to the day, an African-American Illinois State Senator gave a commencement address at Knox College. Three years after that address, that man, Barack Obama, would be elected President of the United States. I wonder what Stephen Douglas would think about that.