Lincoln's Peoria Address Calls for Return to the Founders' Intent

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 The Act opened all the western territories gained from the Mexican War to the possibility of slavery and repealed the Missouri Compromise that had barred slavery from the northern territories remaining from the Louisiana Purchase.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 of a territory could elect to have slavery if they so wanted it. To Lincoln, this Act reversed the intent of the Founders who had thought they had put the nation on a path toward the ultimate extinction of this most abhorrent institution. The Kansas-Nebraska Act jarred Lincoln back into politics, leading him to seek a political office where he could rekindle the Founders’ belief in the fundamental principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

On October 16, 1854, Lincoln gave a speech in Peoria, Illinois, that laid out his critique of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on moral, political, legal, and historical grounds. He reiterated and updated these concepts in an early 1860 speech in Hartford, Connecticut, during his second speaking tour of New England. Both speeches are long, but the following provides some key points relevant to the nation’s founding.

Lincoln showed that Douglas denied the reality that “the policy of prohibiting slavery into the new territories” originated with Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who proposed the idea of ceding the northwest territories to the federal government and barring slavery from the region. Contrary to Douglas’s assertions, the federal government had worked hard to limit the expansion of slavery, noting not only the Northwest Ordinance (1787) but also the ending of the International Slave Trade (1808), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, the latter of which included ending the slave trade in the federal territory of the District of Columbia. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act reversed the intent of the Founders.

Whereas the Founders sought to put slavery on a path to its ultimate extinction, the Kansas-Nebraska bill brought it back. Once slavery was called a “necessary evil” that through the reality of its existing presence required its forbearance in order to create a constitutional Union, the South now calls slavery a “positive good” and threatens to destroy that Union unless the North speaks and acts as if slavery were right. No, Lincoln argues, slavery IS wrong and we should return to our “ancient faith” of the Founders’ intent rather than replace it with the “new faith” of popular sovereignty.

Lincoln goes on to give an example of how the South has reversed the Founders’ intentions:

When [Indiana Senator] Pettit, in connection with his support of the [Kansas-] Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident lie," of the forty odd [pro-Kansas-] Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any [Kansas-] Nebraska newspaper, or any [Kansas-] Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. … [And yet] If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.

Let no one be deceived, Lincoln continues. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of [Kansas-] Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.

Lincoln called for the United States to return to the principles of the Founders in words that should resonate with all Americans today:

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south---let all Americans---let all lovers of liberty everywhere---join in this great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

[Image of statue of Lincoln in front of Peoria courthouse taken by David J. Kent]