Once he left home he was a simple shopkeeper and manual laborer cutting wood until his first political position in 1834 after losing in his 1832 campaign when he was elected to the House of Representative for Illinois as a member of the whig party. This was a pretty amazing feat because he never went to a university to learn law but thought him self and passed the exams to become a certified lawyer and got a job with a lawyering firm before he was elected. Lincoln joined and support the the Whig Party because of their protective tariffs and he shared their views against slavery, believing that slavery only hurt the national economy. After his first election to the Illinois House of Representatives he won the next three in a row until becoming a member in the US House of Representatives. Shortly after his term in the US House of Representatives he proposed an amendment to the constitution to abolish slavery which did not get passed but showed how much Abraham was against slavery. Then in 1854 he went before to argue against the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed individual states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. This debate got a lot of attention and provide publicity for Lincoln to citizens who were also against slavery. This act had small violent opposition in some parts of Illinois and Kansas and sparked Abes interest in politics once again after five years of not holding any political position. This soon lead to the forming of one of the most popular and oldest political parties in US history, the Republican party. .
As the Whig party fell into shambles Abe joined the Republican party. After the debate of the Kansas-Nebraska Act Lincoln ran for the senate against Stephen Douglas. Lincoln was very much opposed the Supreme Court, President, and Douglas for promoting slavery and famously said "A house divided can not stand" and delivered a famous speech name, "A House Divided," which spoke out having the country divided with half being for slavery and the other half opposed to it.