issouri to enter the Union as a slave State,
but positively forbidding slavery in all other territory of the United
States lying north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, which was the
southern boundary-line of Missouri.

Up to that time the Southern States, where slavery was lawful, had been
as wealthy and quite as powerful in politics as the Northern or free
States. The great unoccupied territory lying to the west, which, in
years to come, was sure to be filled with people and made into new
States, lay, however, mostly north of 36 degrees 30 minutes; and it was
easy to see that as new free States came one after the other into the
Union the importance of the South must grow less and less, because there
was little or no territory left out of which slave States could be
made to offset them. The South therefore had been anxious to have the
Missouri Compromise repealed.

The people of the North, on the other hand, were not all wise or
disinterested in their way of attacking slavery. As always happens,
self-interest and moral purpose mingled on both sides; but, as a whole,
it may be said that they wished to get rid of slavery because they felt
it to be wrong, and totally out of place in a country devoted to freedom
and liberty. The quarrel between them was as old as the nation, and it
had been gaining steadily in intensity. At first only a few persons in
each section had been really interested. By the year 1850 it had come
to be a question of much greater moment, and during the ten years that
followed was to increase in bitterness until it absorbed the thoughts of
the entire people, and plunged the country into a terrible civil war.

Abraham Lincoln had grown to manhood while the question was gaining in
importance. As a youth, during his flatboat voyages to New Orleans he
had seen negroes chained and beaten, and the injustice of slavery had
been stamped upon his soul. The uprightness of his mind abhorred a
system that kept men in bondage merely because they happened to be
black. The intensity of his feeling on the subject had made him a Whig
when, as a friendless boy, he lived in a town where Whig ideas were much
in disfavor. The same feeling, growing stronger as he grew older, had
inspired the Lincoln-Stone protest and the bill to free the slaves in
the District of Columbia, and had caused him to vote at least forty
times against slavery in one form or another during his short term in
Congress. The repeal of the Missouri