The Problematic Kansas-Nebraska Act

I. Arousal
The problematic Kansas-Nebraska Act, as any reader of American history knows, drove Abraham Lincoln back into politics in 1854. Speaking of himself in the third person for a campaign autobiography in 1860 he claimed to have been "aroused as he had never been before," by the success of Stephen A Douglas’s legislation. He admitted in that brief sketch that his pursuit of a private life practicing law in Springfield, Illinois had "almost superseded his thoughts of politics" as a career. The threat of the resuscitation of the institution of slavery from its excruciatingly slow and crooked “course of ultimate extinction” that the founders envisioned for it, however, profoundly disturbed his silent confidence in the efficacy of their wisdom.

After spending the better portion of his adult years fighting for Whig party interests in Illinois and Washington DC, events turned Lincoln's mind toward an issue that had always bothered him, although he remained relatively quiet about it, but now evoked within him a virtuous passion.

It can hardly be doubted that after 1854 Lincoln's public persona targeted the legal exclusion of the “peculiar institution” in the United States. The “open war” that he now detected against the principles of the founding--his "ancient religion"--and its experiment in self-government--of which he boldly declared more than fifteen years earlier had evolved from an "undecided experiment" to a "successful one"--provoked him to speak out more strongly than he thought necessary or wise at any time prior in his political career against the burgeoning influence of pro-slavery politicians who rejected the latter and threatened the former. To "save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow"--the principles that Jefferson predicted would be "the Signal of arousing men” to action—Lincoln fought to reset the country's trajectory toward the founders' original intent, as he understood it,

regarding slavery.
What aroused Lincoln is complicated in its dissection. He had not spoken out forcefully against slavery or racial inequality in his political career to that period. His focus as a young politician while a member of local, state and national chambers was to improve infrastructure in order to open opportunity for more Americans. In the public forum, Lincoln was morally against what the members of the other party, the Democrats, were morally for. When Martin Van Buren ran against a Whig candidates for president, Lincoln stumped across Illinois against him by reminding voters that Van Buren supported Black suffrage while in the New York legislature.
Van Buren had defeated the charisma politics of Andrew Jackson largely by creating the modern political party system in reaction to the populism of the seventh president. That is the political world Abraham Lincoln competed and came to master.
Lincoln, in throughout his political career, was a party man above all else. He believed in the strength of political parties the way Van Buren had designed them a generation before Lincoln’s entrance into the increasingly modern profession of politics.
In antebellum America, Slavery was hopelessly entangled with race in a great Gordian knot of social and political norms.

To tackle it successfully, a politician had to separate slavery from race as a political issue. The serious anti-slavery politician had to walk a thin tightrope between constitutionally acceptable emancipation and the inevitable progress toward racial equality that it obviously entailed. There was great support for the ending of slavery but little for any move toward the leveling of race in America. Few made a stand for such progress. They were considered most radical and dangerous. But abolitionists came in all forms. Sure there was Frederick Douglass, Horace Greely and William Lloyd Garrison, but many abolitionists sought an emancipation for blacks that did not include civil rights, citizenship or, indeed, even residence in the country. A stealthy politician seeking to bring about slavery’s end, for any reason, had to be sure not to upset the fear of racial equality that pervaded the body politic and informed public

sentiment.