In fact Lincoln owned slaves and viewed himself as a farmer or common man. Lincoln did not want to ban slavery on states that served as buffers between the Union and Confederacy states because the Confederacy would be able to attack easier its a battle strategy. Lincoln was more concerned with saving the Union at all cost than banning slavery
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If its the end of slavery then all of the states were free
All the Northern states were free soil. Then there were four slave-states of the Upper South which did not vote Confederate. Lincoln kept them onside by allowing them practise slavery for the duration of the war. Those states were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware.
15 out of 34 states were slave states.
Lincoln believed it was important to keep these borders states in union, even though that were slave states. That is why in 1861 he continued to say that his aim was to hold the united states together, not to abolish slavery.
The North and South were arguing about the existance of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was elected president. He was anti-slavery, and abolishing slavery would destroy the South's slave based economy (cotton). They seceeded from the Union to keep their slaves.