In one of the long series of debates in Congress on the question of the
right to take slaves into free territory, a planter from South Carolina
drew an affecting picture of his relations with his old coloured
foster-mother, the "mammy" of the plantation. "Do you tell me," he said,
addressing himself to a Free-soil opponent, "that I, a free American
citizen, am not to be permitted, if I want to go across the Missouri
River, to take with me my whole home circle? Do you say that I must
leave my old 'Mammy' behind in South Carolina?" "Oh!" replied the
Westerner, "the trouble with you is not that you cannot take your
'Mammy' into this free territory, but that you are not to be at liberty
to sell her when you get her there."
Lincoln threw himself with full earnestness of conviction and ardour
into the fight to preserve for freedom the territory belonging to the
nation. In common with the majority of the Whig party, he held the
opinion that if slavery could be restricted to the States in which it
was already in existence, if no further States should be admitted into
the Union with the burden of slavery, the institution must, in the
course of a generation or two, die out. He was clear in his mind that
slavery was an enormous evil for the whites as well as for the blacks,
for the individual as for the nation.
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