By David J. Kent May 22, 2026 Abraham Lincoln had been out of political office for five years when in 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Act opened all the western territories gained from the Mexican War to the possibility of slavery and repealed the Missouri Compromise that had barred slavery from the northern territories remaining from the Louisiana Purchase. The Act codified Douglas’s contention that the white residents

Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and a politician, not a historian. But as the 16th president, he saw the challenges of the Civil War against a backdrop of history, and particularly the history of the American Revolution.