n--Lincoln's Campaign
Speeches--Chicago Banquet Speech

After the expiration of his term in Congress Mr. Lincoln applied himself
with unremitting assiduity to the practice of law, which the growth of
the State in population, and the widening of his acquaintanceship no
less than his own growth in experience and legal acumen, rendered ever
more important and absorbing.

"In 1854," he writes, "his profession had almost superseded the thought
of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise
aroused him as he had never been before."

Not alone Mr. Lincoln, but, indeed, the whole nation, was so
aroused--the Democratic party, and nearly the entire South, to force the
passage of that repeal through Congress, and an alarmed majority,
including even a considerable minority of the Democratic party in the
North, to resist its passage.

Mr. Lincoln, of course, shared the general indignation of Northern
sentiment that the whole of the remaining Louisiana Territory, out of
which six States, and the greater part of two more, have since been
organized and admitted to the Union, should be opened to the possible
extension of slavery. But two points served specially to enlist his
energy in the controversy. One was personal, in that Senator Douglas of
Illinois, by whom the repeal was championed, and whose influence as a
free-State senator and powerful Democratic leader alone made the repeal
possible, had been his personal antagonist in Illinois politics for
almost twenty years. The other was moral, in that the new question
involved the elemental principles of the American government, the
fundamental maxim of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are
created equal. His intuitive logic needed no demonstration that bank,
tariff, internal improvements, the Mexican War, and their related
incidents, were questions of passing expediency; but that this sudden
reaction, needlessly grafted upon a routine statute to organize a new
territory, was the unmistakable herald of a coming struggle which might
transform republican institutions.

It was in January, 1854, that the accidents of a Senate debate threw
into Congress and upon the country the firebrand of the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise. The repeal was not consummated till the month of
May; and from May until the autumn elections the flame of acrimonious
discussion ran over the whole country like a wild fire. There is no
record that Mr. Lincoln took any public