Lincoln: "The Monstrous Injustice of Slavery" Abraham Lincoln had settled into his Illinois law practice in 1854 when the United States Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Lincoln: "The Monstrous Injustice of Slavery" Abraham Lincoln had settled into his Illinois law practice in 1854 when the United States Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law removed the north-south dividing line between free and slave territory that had been created by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and allowed the two new states to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Galvanized by the law, Lincoln began to campaign fervently for antislavery Whig politicians in Illinois and against Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who authored the act. Lincoln delivered the speech excerpted here in Peoria, Illinois. Lincoln: 'The Monstrous Injustice of Slavery' October 16, 1854 I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong; wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska--and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites--causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty--criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but selfinterest.... ...If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to ...