n slavery and race were shaped by his experiences on the prairie as a young man, a lawyer and a legislator in the Illinois State Assembly and the House of Representatives (1846-1847) and as President.
Pre-Civil War Views. Lincoln was personally exposed to slavery and found it morally repugnant and politically corrupting. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates at Quincy, Illinois on October 13, 1858, he said: "we think it [slavery] is a moral, a social and a political wrong" (Basler 3: 254). According to black leader and former slave Frederick Douglass, "though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his fellow-countrymen against the negro, . . . in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery" (Stony 52-53). In 1854 Lincoln said the "monstrous injustice of slavery . . . deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enabling the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites" (McPherson Abraham 51).
Lincoln consistently opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. Although he supported the Missouri Compromise of 1850, he backed the Wilmot Proviso which would have excluded slavery entirely from the West. He, however, opposed the abolitionist crusade to eliminate slavery in the South because, as he said at Quincy, "we have no right [under the Constitution] to disturb it in the States where it exists" (Basler 3:254-255). He summed up his position on the eve of the Civil War in a letter to a Southerner, John Gilmore, on December 15, 1860: "you think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted" (President Lincoln Explains What 66). As the sectional controversy between North and South intensified during the 1850s, Lincoln's doubts as to whether slavery in the South and free government were compatible over the long run grew. In a speech to the Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858, he said: "a ho...