Abstract
‘Liberty’ examines the roots of Lincoln's revulsion for slavery and describes the condition of liberal democracy in Europe and America in the 1840s. Lincoln saw slavery as a direct obstruction of the Free Trade in Ability which liberalism adored and he had always been confident that the problem of slavery would solve itself, provided it could not expand. The Kansas–Nebraska Act jeopardized this expectation and, Lincoln argued, betrayed the intentions of the Founders by feigning indifference to slavery's spread. In June 1856, Lincoln was persuaded to transfer his allegiance to a new, all-Northern and unequivocally anti-slavery party, the Republicans.
