At the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's second term as a state representative, several southern legislatures feared that the Federal Government would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and most members of the Illinois Legislature shared that concern. In January 1837, the Illinois Legislature adopted resolutions condemning abolition societies, declaring the right of property in slaves sacred to the slaveholding states under the Federal Constitution, asserting that slavery in the District of Columbia could not be abolished without the consent of its citizens, and requesting that the Governor send copies to Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, New York, and Connecticut. Although Illinois was technically a free state, enslaved people were still held there after statehood as indentured servants under terms lasting as long as 99 years, and slaveholders included prominent officials such as former territorial governor Ninian Edwards and first state governor Shadrach Bond. On March 3, 1837, in Vandalia, Dan Stone and Abraham Lincoln entered a protest into the record, Lincoln's first official public stand on slavery and his first formal protest against it. Though the protest may seem restrained, it was controversial in a state where antislavery views were unpopular, a climate underscored later that year when Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Alton on November 7, 1837.