“Try reading about the Lincoln Douglas Debates, held even before Lincoln became president. Lincoln was an abolitionist far earlier and was an early member of the Republican Party which was founded on the premise of ending slavery and preventing its expansion into the territories.”
If I read the Lincoln-Douglas debate in context of the House Divided speech, will it support the notion that “Lincoln fought to free the slaves?”
Read them. Don’t ask me to interpret them for you. Douglas was a Pro-Slavery Democrat while Lincoln was an anti-Slavery Republican. Both appeared in seven debates in seven different county venues hoping to convince the area voters to persuade their Illinois state senators to select one of them to be the new US Senator for Illinois for the next six years. The main topic of each debate was slavery. The verbatim texts of each debate were published in almost every newspaper in the country and were likely the major reason Lincoln was elected President.
The facts are that as a man of his time, Lincoln was not seeking social equality for the black people, but he was fighting to end chattel slavery as abhorrent to society and the concept of freedom as espoused in the Declaration of Independence, which the Democrats claimed, and apparently still do, was an "obvious lie."