"The monstrous injustice of slavery itself"
Lincoln’s speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in
Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854 (GLC00590)
In 1854, Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed settlers to choose whether slavery would exist in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. The possible expansion of slavery galvanized abolitionists and drew Abraham Lincoln back into politics.
In a speech in Peoria, Ill., on October 16, 1854, Lincoln asked voters to elect Congressmen who would repeal the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reinstate the limits on slavery established in the Missouri Compromise. The ideas he presented on slavery, gradual emancipation, colonization, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the goals of the founders continued to inform Lincoln’s thinking on slavery and American equality for the next decade.
