Abraham Lincoln

17 Pages 4177 Words

commanding position at the bar. As he says himself, he was losing his interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him again. The profound agitation of the question of slavery, which in 1854 followed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, awakened all the energies of Lincoln's nature. He regarded this act, in which Senator Douglas was the most prominent agent of the reactionary party, as a gross breach of faith, and began at once a series of earnest political discussions which immediately placed him at the head of the party that, not only in Illinois but throughout the west, was speedily formed to protest against and oppose the throwing open of the territories to the encroachments of slavery.
This bold utterance excited the fears of his timid friends, and laid him open to the hackneyed and conventional attacks of the supporters of slavery; but throughout the contest, while he did not for an instant lower this lofty tone of opposition to slavery and hope of its extinction, he refused to be crowded by the fears of hi...