On August 26, 1854, at a Whig county convention in the Scott County courtroom in Winchester, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln first publicly challenged U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas's Nebraska Bill. Because the bill allowed the expansion of slavery, Lincoln was so aroused that he re-entered politics after five years of political retirement to oppose it. Drafted by Douglas and called popular sovereignty, the Kansas/Nebraska Act gave new territories and emerging states the right to choose by popular ballot whether slavery would be permitted or banned. The bill effectively canceled the Missouri Compromise, which for the previous 34 years had allowed only limited expansion of slavery in the nation. Lincoln's anti-Nebraska speeches and his historic 1858 debates with Douglas brought him national political recognition. Although he failed twice to become U.S. Senator, first as a Whig and then as a Republican, Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States in 1860. Civil War came to the nation in 1861. After the Confederate defeat at Antietam, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in rebellious states. He signed the 13th Amendment on February 1, 1865. When it was ratified on December 6, 1865, the law freed 4 million African-American slaves, made the Kansas/Nebraska Act moot, and forever banned slavery. That day in Winchester, Lincoln ended his masterly effort with a prediction about the Union that he later repeated in Peoria: "We shall have so saved it (from slavery), that the millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed to the latest generation."