Things I Wrote Instead of My Lincoln Paper - Part 1

Lincoln explains himself all too well.  How is one supposed to write a paper arguing that he was anti-savery, when he says things like "I have always hated slavery" and "I am ... anti-slavery?"  There is no argument!  Everything he says, he explains somewhere when he thought so, how and why he thought so, with and to whom he thought or said so, whether he has ever changed his mind, and everything else that one might normally expect to extract by analysis.