As a young man, he moved west to the free state of Illinois. On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,and in the address he spoke about slavery. Seven weeks earlier, a mob in Illinois killed Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and editor of a newspaper with strong anti-slavery views. "The mood of Illinois when an angry mob killed Lovejoy was pro-slavery, but not only in Illinois. The state legislatures of Connecticut and New York in the mid-1830s passed resolutions stating that slavery was accepted in the U. S. Constitution and that no state had a right to interfere." Lincoln himself had been one of only six in the Illinois House of Representatives to vote against a resolution saying "that the right of property in slaves is sacred ... (that) we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies ... that the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. ... Six weeks later, he and Representative Dan Stone filed a protest to the passage of the resolution—a rarely used device to register strong disagreement."