Birth of a Nation
During Lincoln's campaign he promised not to end slavery in the South but he was opposed to the spread of slavery into the western territories. Lincoln was determined to keep this from happening. He said that all Americans must get ready for the end of slavery someday.
Plantation owners wanted to keep their slaves and to set up more slave states in the West. They felt that the government didn't have the right to tell them what to do with their slaves. They felt that each new state should be allowed to decide for itself what it wanted to do. This issue of states' rights was one of the reasons for the Civil War.