Abraham Lincoln grew up in a poor pioneer family in Kentucky and Indiana. He never saw slaves until he was nineteen and traveled to New Orleans by flatboat.
Peter Burchard traces the Lincoln's growing awareness of slavery as a political issue in the states of the Missouri Compromise, just west of his home in Illinois, and as it was splitting the nation north and south. His northern upbringing condemned slavery, but he only slowly learned to appreciate the condition of Blacks in the south and the north. Frederick Douglass, the great black Abolitionist, helped Lincoln to understand this, and, along with the conditions on the war front, led him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and seek the freedom of all slaves by the war's end.
