Lincoln’s clarity on slavery.

[David Lockmiller]

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, proposed by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to settlement. It effectively repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise that had restricted slavery in the territories north of 36⁰30′ latitude which included Kansas and Nebraska. Instead, the Kansas-Nebraska Act said that the settlers of those territories could decide for themselves whether they would be free or slave states, a concept that Douglas called “popular sovereignty.”

Lincoln wrote in this speech various elements:

We have been in the habit of deploring the fact that slavery exists among us. We have ever deplored it. Our forefathers did, and they declared, as we have done in later years, the blame rested upon the mother government of Great Britain. We constantly condemn Great Britain for not preventing slavery from coming amongst us. She would not interfere to prevent it, and so individuals were able to introduce the institution without opposition.

We are a great empire. We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself. It has been said that such a race of prosperity has been run nowhere else. We find a people on the Northeast, who have a different government from ours, being ruled by a Queen. Turning to the South, we see a people who, while they boast of being free, keep their fellow beings in bondage.

I have noticed in Southern newspapers, particularly the Richmond Enquirer, the Southern view of the Free States. They insist that slavery has a right to spread. They defend it on principle. They insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern laborers! They think that men are always to remain laborers here – but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him. These men don’t understand when they think in this manner of Northern free labor.

We believe that it is right that slavery should not be tolerated in the new territories, yet we cannot get support for this doctrine, except in one part of this country. Slavery is looked upon by men in light of dollars and cents. The estimated worth of slaves at the South is $1,000,000,000, and in a very few years, if the institution shall be admitted in the territories, they will have increased by 50 percent in value.