[Regular train service begins on Alton & Chicago Railroad. Jacksonville Constitutionalist, 3 August 1854.]

Lincoln, preparing to attend Whig county convention at Winchester on Saturday, goes to Jacksonville, where he stays with Yates. James G. Miner, Abraham Lincoln: Personal Reminiscences of the Martyr-Emancipator as He Appeared in the Memorable Campaign of 1854 and in His Subsequent Career (N.p., 1912), 1-2.

Lincoln addresses a Whig Party convention. A newspaper reports, "His subject was the one which is uppermost in the minds of the people—the Nebraska-Kansas bill; and the ingenious, logical, and at the same time fair and candid manner, in which he exhibited the great wrong and injustice of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory, deserves and has received the warmest commendation of every friend of freedom . . . His . . . masterly effort . . . was replete with unanswerable arguments, which must and will effectually tell at the coming election." Illinois Daily Journal, 2 September 1854, 2:2; Speech at Winchester, Illinois, 26 August 1854, CW, 2:226-27.

This is Lincoln's first speech on Kansas-Nebraska Act.