Lincoln meets English manufacturer and Liberal leader Richard Cobden during Cobden's visit to Springfield, either on Thursday, May 12, or this morning at the State Capitol. Cobden does not mention Lincoln in his diary of the trip but two years later describes him as "a backwoodsman of good sturdy common sense, but evidently unequal to the occasion." Elizabeth Hoon Cawley, ed., The American Diaries of Richard Cobden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 75, 189-90.

Lincoln urges Mark W. Delahay not to permit Kansas Republicans to lower party standard. "In my judgement such a step would be a serious mistake—would open a gap through which more would pass out than pass in. And this would be the same, whether the letting down should be in deference to Douglasism, or to the southern opposition element." He cannot attend Kansas convention. Lincoln sends same letter to two other Kansas Republicans, and writes briefly to Peter H. Watson of Cincinnati about patent case. Abraham Lincoln to Mark W. Delahay, 14 May 1859, CW, 3:378-79; Enclosure to Mark W. Delahay, [14 May 1859], CW, 3:379-80; Abraham Lincoln to Peter H. Watson, [14 May 1859], CW, 2:380.