Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 1856
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About This Text
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Composed: c.1856 CE
Lincoln delivered this address in Peoria, Illinois as part of a speaking tour against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln had withdrawn from politics at the end of his single congressional term in 1849, but the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 spurred him to return. Lincoln uses historical precedent to show that the Act breaks with prior legislation such as the Northwest Ordinance which kept slavery confined to the South. Lincoln argued that the careful compromises between slave states and free states had kept the Union together from the time of the ratification of the Constitution to the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Far from encouraging further peaceful coexistence, Lincoln warned the Kansas-Nebraska Act would lead to conflict and sectionalism.