Published November 29, 2025
By Reg Ankrom
On January 7, 1861, Virginia Gov. John Letcher proposed that delegates from every state gather in Washington, D.C. for a national conference to stop what he called a “monstrous” march toward disunion “merely because men cannot agree about a domestic institution,” slavery.
Illinois Gov. John Wood, whose ten-month term would end one week after Letcher’s plea, knew there was no chance that disunion could be averted. The presidential election of 1856 had foreshadowed the coming division.
John C. Fremont, who in 1856 was the two-year-old Republican Party’s first presidential candidate, had nearly been elected on a platform to stop the spread of slavery. Had he won Pennsylvania, which went to favorite son James Buchanan, and either Illinois or Indiana, Fremont instead of Buchanan would have been the 15th president of the United States. And he would have achieved the victory without a single electoral vote from the South.
Fremont’s near-miss showed Republicans that they could win the presidency in the North alone. That became the Lincoln campaign committee’s successful strategy for 1860. The South recognized the threat. Ten southern states did not even include Lincoln’s name on the ballot. The lesson of the 1856 election for the South was that they no longer had the iron grip they had exerted on the government for most of seven decades. Foreseeing no satisfactory way to protect slavery, Southern “Fireaters,” pro-slavery extremists, began planning secession.
By February 4, 1861, when the “Washington Peace Conference” convened, disunion was well underway. South Carolina had departed on December 20, 1860. Mississippi left on January 9, 1861. By February 1, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas also left
A full month before Lincoln was inaugurated president, the Confederate Congress convened its first meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, February 4, 1861. On that same day, former President John Tyler of Virginia, a slave owner elected the peace convention’s chairman, gaveled to order the 132 delegates from 21 states.
If there were those who thought the Deep South could be enticed to return to the union, John Wood was not among them. He was one of five Illinois delegates to the peace convention. Other delegates were Ottawa lawyer Burton C. Cook, Lincoln’s second law partner Stephen T. Logan, anti-Nebraska Democrat John M. Palmer, and Freeport Mayor Thomas J. Turner.
In Washington, Wood took little interest in the convention. Other states’ representatives looked to the Illinois delegation for clues to Lincoln’s thinking. Wood and the delegation provided little. That reflected Lincoln’s attitude toward the convention. He saw nothing could from it. As he said in more than a dozen letters in December 1860, President-elect Lincoln admonished friends, north and south: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost. . . .The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Lincoln did not waver from that position, although he made no remarks about it during the convention.
Wood’s main contribution during the peace convention came when he learned that New York financiers had threatened to stop the flow of money to Lincoln’s administration unless some compromise was achieved with the South. New York bankers and brokers were largely dependent on revenues that southern cotton brought them. Wood, along with Palmer and Cook, urged Governor Yates to guarantee a proportionate share of loans to the federal government to weaken the New York financiers’ influence over Lincoln’s administration.
Those Congressional radicals who welcomed Wood’s appointment to the convention had reason to believe he was one of them. Wood had been among the first Whigs to subscribe to the new Republican Party and its 1856 platform demanding a limit to slavery and denying its extension into free territories.
A native New Yorker, Wood was known for anti-slavery sentiment. He considered his life’s greatest achievement to prevent an attempt by the Illinois General Assembly, dominated by transplanted southerners, to turn the six-year-old Illinois into a slave state. Voters in the Illinois Military Tract opposed a referendum to create a slave constitution by a 90-to-10 ratio. Statewide, the ratio of defeat was 57 to 43.
Nominated by Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans, Wood was elected Illinois’ lieutenant governor at the top of the party’s first statewide ticket in 1856. He became governor on March 18, 1860, when Republican Gov. William Henry Bissell died in office.
With business interests pre-occupying him—the reason he declined Republican requests in 1860 that he seek a four-year term as governor, Wood got permission from the Illinois General Assembly to remain in Quincy. He attended to state business from an office in his Greek Revival mansion on 12th and State Streets. He altered a room on the south side of the house to accommodate the official governor’s office by extending a parlor over the south porch, which he then enclosed, nearly doubling the space.
When he conducted official business, Wood closed the double doors between the governor’s office and his home’s family room. Visitors entered through a doorway on the west side of the porch.
His use of the Quincy office enabled Wood to offer his party’s dark horse presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the governor’s office at the state capital in Springfield for his 1860 campaign. Lincoln took Wood up on the offer. Wood also allowed Bissell’s widow to continue residency in the governor’s mansion in Springfield.
John Wood understood that great danger lurked in the historical lessons of the 1856 elections. The North was growing. The South was not. That relationship was upending the compromises that forged a union in 1789 by writing provisions in the Constitution that gave the South control of the federal government, so long as the provisions remained effective. The constitution’s “federal ratio,” a euphemistic mechanism that had given the South an extra three-fifths vote for every slave, was no longer enough to keep up with the North’s surging population—and an increasing number of representatives in congress. In the House of Representatives, Northern attacks on slavery came with greater frequency and greater volume. The silence of Northerner John Wood at the Washington Peace Convention was deafening.
Reg Ankrom is a former director of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. He is a local historian, author of a prize-winning two-volume biography of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and a frequent speaker on Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and antebellum America.
Sources:
“Abstract of Gov. Wood’s Message.” The Quincy Daily Whig, Jan. 9, 1861.
Basler, Roy P., ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV, 1860-1861. 9 vols. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953.
Burlingame, Michael. Abraham Lincoln,: A Life, Vol.2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
“Election of 1856,” The American Presidency Project at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1856
“Great Union Meeting,” The Quincy Whig Republican. March 30, 1861.
Gunderson, Robert Gray. Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.
Howard, Robert P. Mostly Good and Competent Men: Illinois Governors 1818 to 1898. Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Issues and Illinois State Historical Society, 1988.
National Party Platforms, 1840-1972. 5th Ed. Compiled by Donald Bruce Johnson and Kirk H. Porter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.
Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln, Prologue to Civil War, 1859-1860. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950.
