Immediately to the west of the building in which Kersey Fell established his law offices, stood Phoenix Hall, where on April ten, eighteen hundred and sixty, I gave a speech. This entire block on West Washington Street was known as the Phoenix Block, because it quickly rose from the ashes of a fire that destroyed it in eighteen hundred and fifty-five. Originally, there were seven buildings. Only two survive today.
The Phoenix Building itself occupied most of the block and housed lawyers and doctors, even a carpenter and a job printer. There was a post office, furniture store, a bank, clothiers. Why, even groceries and medicines were sold from businesses in this block. The Great Hall was located on the third and fourth floors of the big building, and it quickly became a popular gathering place for us politicians, particularly those of us of the Republican bent, and those who wanted to hear us. In any event, on that rainy April evening, they say that between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred people trudged through the mud and up the stairs just to hear me deliver what turned out to be my last political speech of any note before being nominated for the presidency the next month at Chicago.
As you have probably heard, I was not usually one to pass up an opportunity to share my views on the issues of the day, and since the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in eighteen hundred and fifty-four, I managed to find plenty of opportunities.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was wrong in just about every way you could look at it. It was wrong because it threatened to spread slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and all the other territories. Now, I hated this apparent zeal for the spread of slavery, not only for the monstrous injustice of slavery itself, but because it deprived our Republican example of its just influence in the world. It enabled the enemies of free institutions to ridicule us as hypocrites. It caused the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity. It put us into an open war with the fundamental principles of civil liberties. It criticized our Declaration of Independence, and it insisted that there was no right principle of action but self-interest.
Well, my arguments against the spread of slavery were pretty well known by then, so what I told my friends in Bloomington was nothing new. The Pantagraph said my speech was clear, appropriate, forcible, and conclusive on every point, and went on to call me the fairest and most honest political speaker in the country.
Now, that is high praise indeed, but we must remember that the Pantagraph was controlled by my good friend and benefactor, Jesse Fell, and it certainly wasn't about to call one of Jesse's friends a scoundrel.
You probably also ought to know that the Phoenix Hall was the scene of another of my great failures, too. That occurred on the evening of April the eighth, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, when I was scheduled to deliver my lecture on discoveries and inventions to benefit the Ladies' Library Association. Admittance was a quarter, and as only about forty people were in attendance, it was decided to, as the newspaper reported, adjourn the matter.
Naturally, I assumed that the good people of Bloomington had gained sufficient knowledge of the subject when I delivered the same address in the city the previous winter, and therefore saw fit to spend this early spring evening in other pursuits. [upbeat music] In any case, Phoenix Hall thus became the scene of the end of my career in lyceum lecturing. [upbeat music]
