" He assured the southern states that slavery would remain untouched due to the protection of it. Lincoln acknowledged that "neither Congress nor a Territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States Territory,"" but he was a strong believer in limiting the spread of slavery. .
Although Lincoln was against the heinous act of slavery, he was dubious to the question of equality among the two races. He did not understand where slaves would stand if slavery was abolished. Lincoln wondered "free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?" In spite of the fact that Lincoln was not as prejudice as other men, he had shared some of their biased perspectives. Lincoln "had insisted that blacks should enjoy the same natural rights as whites (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness)" but he had speculated that they "were not an intrinsic part of american society." He believed that the "government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln had truly concluded that blacks and whites could not live among each other without being moderately equal. He began to think "of the United States as a biracial society" which would make whites living with blacks tough. He speculated that blacks deserved equality to an extent where they no longer had to be slaves, but not commensurately enough to have legal equality. With the question of egalitarianism, it brought up the question of colonization of African Americans out of the United States. .
Lincoln had examined where African Americans would go after the abolishment of slavery because the country would become segregated. Like all men, Lincoln was unsure of what would happen once slavery ended. His first "impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia to their own native land," which leads to the idea of colonization for African Americans. Lincoln was pro colonization, therefore he believed that African Americans deserved the right to colonize outside of the United States.
