Compromise repealed.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
Compromise, throwing open once more to slavery a vast amount of