They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not now introduce it. . . . I surely will not blame them [Southerners] for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [slavery]. . . . When they [Southerners] remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly, and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not, in their stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery. . . . But all this, to my judgment furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our . . . free territory than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.”1 Abraham Lincoln spoke these enormously important words in Peoria, Illinois, not long after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They simultaneously declared his disagreement with the abolitionists’ gospel of hate and vituperation and his commitment to preventing slavery from becoming legal in any new states formed from the western territories.
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