Lincoln the Candidate – Following his single term in the House of Representatives Abraham Lincoln left politics to practice law full time. Then, motivated by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted chattel slavery to expand into free territories, and the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, in which U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that Black people were without rights as human beings under the U.S. Constitution, Lincoln publicly reentered the political fray in 1858 as the nation’s deep divisions took a starring role on the political stage. The newly formed Republican Party, loosely held together by a belief in free labor ideology and antislavery viewpoints, elected moderate Abraham Lincoln as its 1860 nominee for president—moderate in part because Lincoln had no intention of interfering with chattel slavery where it already existed. With four presidential candidates running, the popular vote was split and Lincoln’s electoral win outraged pro-slavery Southerners who began planning to overthrow the newly elected U.S government.