Down in a corner of Indiana where the Lincolns lived there were slaves for years after the admission of the State to the Union, in spite of the ordinance of 1787 and the statutes which Lincoln read in his youth. Nor was the fact a secret. The census of 1820 showed one hundred and ninety slaves, but during the next year the State Supreme Court declared them free. In the following year (1822) occurred a great moral revolution on the frontier. Then commenced the struggle between the friends and opponents of slavery which lasted until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Abraham Lincoln, with the preparation I have described, was from the beginning an active participant, and gradually became a leader in one of the greatest controversies that has ever engaged the intellectual and moral forces of the world. In 1822, eight years before the Lincoln family left Indiana, an attempt was made to introduce slavery into Illinois, and was defeated by Edward Coles, of Virginia, the Governor, who gave his entire salary for four years to pay the expense of the contest. The antislavery members of the Legislature contributed a thousand dollars to the fund, which was spent in the distribution of literature on the subject. For a time the storm subsided, but the deep hatred of the iniquity was spreading through the North, and abolition societies were being organized in every city and village where the friends of human freedom existed in sufficient numbers to sustain themselves against the powerful proslavery sentiment. Occasionally there was a public discussion, but the controversy raged most fiercely at the corner groceries, at the county court-house, and at other places where thinking men were in the habit of assembling, and Lincoln was always ready and eager to enter the debates. His convictions were formed and grew firmer as he studied the question, and his moral courage developed with them. It was a good deal of an ordeal for an ambitious young man just beginning his career to attack a popular institution, in the midst of a community many of whom had been born and educated in slave States and considered what he believed a curse to be a divine institution. Nevertheless, the sense of justice and humanity stimulated Abraham Lincoln to take his place upon the side of freedom, and he never lost an opportunity to denounce slavery as founded on injustice and wrong.