In the 1840s, the self-educated Abraham Lincoln represented slave owner Robert Matson, who wanted to once again enslave a free, mixed-race woman. Lincoln lost the case, and Jane Bryant and her children were declared officially free. They later settled in Liberia. In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd. Her family in Kentucky enslaved Black men and women. While serving as an elected representative in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported Zachary Taylor, a slave owner, in Taylor’s 1848 bid for the presidency. •One of Lincoln’s most representative public statements on the question of race relations was given in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857. In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: ”There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect ...