Peoria Speech Quotes

In 1854, President Franklin Pierce, an anti-abolitionist Democrat, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law, sending slavery’s opponents into a fury. The law, authored by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska but also allowed for the expansion of slavery into the North, where it had been banned since 1819. Slavery would be permitted or banned in Kansas, a northern territory, based on a popular vote among white males in the territory. The law would potentially reintroduce slavery into the North, endangering freedmen and -women and reinforcing slavery’s grip on America. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison published angry treatises against it in their papers. On the steps of the courthouse in Peoria, Illinois, a largely unknown politician named Abraham Lincoln gave a three-hour speech decrying the law. “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,” he told hundreds of onlookers. Afterward, his Peoria speech became a thing of legend that catapulted him into national prominence.

Contact theory was wrong--integration does not result in yet more integration--but we never abandoned it. The result is one of the greatest contradictions in American life. Our laws and ideals assume that race is such a trivial matter we can easily ignore it, and yet our daily lives violate those ideals. Despite pro-integration campaigns by schools, the media, churches, and government, every new generation baffles the social engineers by behaving like earlier generations. In a speech in Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln spoke of the tendency of whites to separate from blacks, but he could have been speaking of any group: 'A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.