these two occasions, Lincoln took but little part in politics until the passage of the Nebraska Bill by Congress in 1854.  The enactment of this measure impelled him to take a firmer stand upon the question of slavery than he had yet assumed.  He had been opposed to the institution on grounds of sentiment since his boyhood; now he determined to fight it from principle.  Mr. Herndon states that Lincoln really became an anti-slavery man in 1831, during his visit to New Orleans, where he was deeply affected by the horrors of the traffic in human beings.  On one occasion he saw a slave, a beautiful mulatto girl, sold at auction.  She was felt over, pinched, and trotted around to show bidders she was sound.  Lincoln walked away from the scene with a feeling of deep abhorrence.  He said to John Hanks, “If I ever get a chance to hit that institution, John, I’ll hit it hard!” Again, in the summer of 1841, he was painfully impressed by a scene witnessed during his journey home from Kentucky, described in a letter written at the time to the sister of his friend Speed, in which he says:  “A fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of conditions upon human happiness.  A man had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South.  They were chained six and six together; a small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this was fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together like so many fish upon a trot-line.  In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery.”

Judge Gillespie records a conversation which he had with Lincoln in 1850 on the slavery question, remarking by way of introduction that the subject of slavery was the only one on which he (Lincoln) was apt to become excited.  “I recollect meeting him once at Shelbyville,” says Judge Gillespie, “when he remarked that something must be done or slavery would overrun the whole country.  He said there were about six hundred thousand non-slaveholding whites in Kentucky to about thirty-three thousand slaveholders; that in the convention then recently held it was expected that the delegates would represent these classes about in proportion to their respective numbers; but when the convention assembled, there was not a single representative of the non-slaveholding class; everyone was in the interest of the slaveholders; ‘and,’ said he, ’the thing is spreading like wildfire over the country.  In a few years we will be ready to accept the institution in Illinois, and the whole country will adopt it.’  I asked him to what he attributed the change that was going on in public opinion.  He said he had recently put that question to a Kentuckian, who answered by