opposition to slavery, which he repeated as he sought the presidency. Speaking in his Kentucky accent, with a very powerful voice, he said that the Kansas-Nebraska Act's "declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world." In 1857, the United States Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford appalled Lincoln. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the decision wrote that blacks were not citizens and derived no rights from the Constitution. While its author hoped that Dred Scott would end all disputes over slavery in the favour of southern slaveholders, the decision sparked further outrage in the North. Lincoln denounced it as the product of a conspiracy to support the Slave Power and believed that the Dred Scott decision, in combination with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, could potentially enable slavery to spread into the free states. He argued the decision was at variance with the Declaration of Independence; he said that while the founding fathers did not believe all men equal in every respect, they believed all men were equal "in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Impressed by the strength of anti-black racism, especially in his home states of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, Lincoln concluded that, because whites would never allow blacks to live in America as equals, they would be better off migrating voluntarily to a colony outside the United States, ideally in Central America or the Caribbean. He had little faith in the program of the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to colonize American blacks in Liberia, on the West African coast. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (transcribed after the fact by Lincoln himself), Lincoln pointed out the immense difficulties of such a task as an obstacle to finding an easy way to quickly end slavery. In a debate in August 1858, he said: According to historian Paul Escott, Lincoln favored a system of gradual emancipation that would allow for controlled management of free Negroes. Nonetheless, Lincoln was instrumental in forging a fusion of antislavery voters into a potent political movement. Letter to Joshua Speed In 1854, Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed, a personal friend and slave owner