October 16, 1864
Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressional hopeful, delivered a speech regarding the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Congress had passed five months earlier. In his speech, the future president denounced the the act and outlined his views on slavery, which he called “immoral.” As Lincoln campaigned over the next several years, he continually referred to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the seeming inevitability that Kansas should become a slave state as “a violence . . . it was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”
