Lincoln's Developing Views on Slavery
Sectional tensions over slavery in the United States had been
building for decades by 1854, when Congress' passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act opened territory that had previously been
closed to slavery according to the Missouri Compromise.
Opposition to the act led to the formation of the Republican
Party in 1854 and revived the failing political career of an
Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who rose from
obscurity to national prominence and claimed the Republican
nomination for president in 1860.
Lincoln personally hated slavery, and considered it immoral. "If
the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that
'all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right
in connection with one man's making a slave of another," he said
in a now-famous speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854. But Lincoln
didn't believe the Constitution gave the federal government the
power to abolish it in the states where it already existed, only to
prevent its establishment to new western territories that would
eventually become states. In his first inaugural address in early
1861, he declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists." By that
time, however, seven Southern states had already seceded from
the Union, forming the Confederate States of America and
setting the stage for the Civil War.
Question: What is the MAIN IDEA of this passage? Answer
using 3 - 5 complete sentences in your own words. Then, prove
your answer by highlighting your evidence in the text above.