Abraham Lincoln was a very ambitious man whose career was politics. Lincoln enforces his own moral judgement by means of an anecdote that occasioned 'Great laughte' according to the newspaper report of his speech. In an autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1860, Lincoln remembered that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 'aroused him as he had never been before'. When Stephen Douglas spoke in defence of his act at Springfield, Illinois, in October of that year, Lincoln delivered the first of a series of speeches that answered Douglas. Lincoln's political filiopiety his reverence for the fathers of the nation predates his campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery. The speeches Lincoln made on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the containment of slavery between 1854 and 1860 are chiefly notable for their meticulous examination of evidence and their resolute and determined reasonableness.