LYCOS RETRIEVER 
President Abraham Lincoln: Slavery
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Abraham Lincoln was born Sunday, February 12, 1809, in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. He was the son of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and he was named for his paternal grandfather. Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter and farmer. Both of Abraham's parents were members of a Baptist congregation which had separated from another church due to opposition to slavery.
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Students of Abraham Lincoln know the canon of his major speeches — from his Lyceum Speech of 1838 to his “Final Remarks” delivered from a White House window, days before he was murdered in 1865. Less well-known are the two speeches given at Springfield and Peoria two weeks apart in 1854. They marked Mr. Lincoln’s reentry into the politics of Illinois and, as he could not know, his preparation for the Presidency in 1861. These Lincoln addresses catapulted him into the debates over slavery which dominated Illinois and national politics for the rest of the decade.
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Lincoln himself gave one answer when he accepted the nomination for senator: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." But Lincoln and the nation were quite unprepared for the violence that came with the answer. Indeed, to fight the political war against slavery, he turned a blind eye toward the probability of a bloody war that would be the price of freedom. He was a pacific man, and as a mature adult he denounced war and military glory as an "attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy." Looking at the future he confused prognosis and preference. Then at age fifty-two he found himself the leader of a nation at war with itself.
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Lincoln returned to politics in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which expressly repealed the limits on slavery's extent as determined by the Missouri Compromise (1820). Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, the most powerful man in the Senate, proposed popular sovereignty as the solution to the slavery impasse, and incorporated it into the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas argued that in a democracy the people should have the right to decide whether or not to allow slavery in their territory, rather than have such a decision imposed on them by Congress.[12]
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In 1837 Lincoln took his first public stand on slavery when the Illinois legislature voted to condemn the activities of the abolition societies that wanted an immediate end to slavery by any means. Lincoln and a colleague declared that slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad politics, but the promulgation of abolitionist doctrine tends rather to increase than abate its evil." Lincoln was against slavery, but he favored lawful means of achieving its destruction. Throughout his political career, Lincoln avoided extreme abolitionist groups.
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These sites have information about the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. See the actual document and read about its impact on slavery and the Civil War. Includes a timeline with important events. There are links to eThemes Resources on slavery during the Civil War, the slave trade, and the Underground Railroad.
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