h Carolina?" "Oh!" replied the
Westerner, "the trouble with you is not that you cannot take your
'Mammy' into this free territory, but that you are not to be at liberty
to sell her when you get her there."

Lincoln threw himself with full earnestness of conviction and ardour
into the fight to preserve for freedom the territory belonging to the
nation. In common with the majority of the Whig party, he held the
opinion that if slavery could be restricted to the States in which it
was already in existence, if no further States should be admitted into
the Union with the burden of slavery, the institution must, in the
course of a generation or two, die out. He was clear in his mind that
slavery was an enormous evil for the whites as well as for the blacks,
for the individual as for the nation. He had himself, as a young man,
been brought up to do toilsome manual labour. He would not admit that
there was anything in manual labour that ought to impair the respect of
the community for the labourer or the worker's respect for himself. Not
the least of the evils of slavery was, in his judgment, its inevitable
influence in bringing degradation upon labour and the labourer.

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act made clear to the North that the
South would accept no limitations for slavery. The position of the
Southern leaders, in which they had the substantial backing of their
constituents, was that slaves were property and that the Constitution,
having guaranteed the protection of property to all the citizens of the
commonwealth, a slaveholder was deprived of his constitutional rights as
a citizen if his control of this portion of his property was in any way
interfered with or restricted. The argument in behalf of this extreme
Southern claim had been shaped most eloquently and most forcibly by John
C. Calhoun during the years between 1830 and 1850. The Calhoun opinion
was represented a few years later in the Presidential candidacy of John
C. Breckinridge. The contention of the more extreme of the Northern
opponents of slavery voters, whose spokesmen were William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James G. Birney, Owen Lovejoy, and others,
was that the Constitution in so far as it recognised slavery (which it
did only by implication) was a compact with evil. They held that the
Fathers had been led into this compact unwittingly and without full
realisation of the responsibilities that they were assuming for the
perpetuation of a g