The litany of events that generations of students have scratched into blue-book essays felt to Lincoln like an open, concerted assault. The Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent violence of Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner in Congress in 1856, the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857—all confirmed the sense that the so-called slave power was on the march, reversing the broad promise of the Revolution itself. The pronouncements of pro-slavery agitators gave Lincoln and the new Republican Party little reason to think otherwise. Slavery, once handled cautiously as a “necessary evil,” had become in some eyes a positive good, the foundation of all liberty and social harmony for white men. Pro-slavery ideologues complained that Thomas Jefferson had been mistaken to announce the principle of universal equality in the Declaration of Independence, and that the Constitution was deficient in the absence of an explicit guarantee of the right to own slaves. In a speech in early 1861, before the Civil War began, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens boasted to applause that the Confederacy’s new constitution had fixed all that.
Many recognized the drift of events and the arguments beneath them; Lincoln was clear and forceful in drawing out their implications for the Founders’ vision of the nation. Early in the fall of 1854, as he prepared his most detailed statement on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which turned territory designated as free into contested ground for slavery, Lincoln was seen “nosing around for weeks” in the Illinois state library. He was assembling the response that would carry him to prominence in speeches and debates for the remainder of the decade.
Lincoln’s argument began in a version of Revolutionary history—careful, lawyerly, selective—that amounted to a mandate to place slavery on the path to “ultimate extinction.” The Founders had deliberately avoided the words slave and slavery in the Constitution, he said, but they had betrayed their true feelings in a series of measures, including the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory and the Constitution’s ban on the international slave trade, to take effect in 1808. As Lincoln saw it, the Founders had compromised with slavery and left the resolution to future generations. “The thing is hid away,” Lincoln said, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise nevertheless that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” He did not specify when the cutting could or should begin—only that when it did, it would be consistent with the Founders’ wishes.