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During the electoral wave of ’54, Lincoln was in Illinois and had just re-entered politics to fight the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act. Although he lost his Senate run, he famously declared his opposition to slavery. That following summer, Lincoln wrote to his lifelong friend Joshua Speed about the Trumpism of the 1800s: “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”

How Lincoln fought Trumpism in the 1850s