Abraham Lincoln And Slavery
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery was one of the central issues in American history.
Abraham Lincoln often expressed moral opposition to slavery in both public and private. Initially, Lincoln expected to bring about the eventual extinction of slavery by stopping its further expansion into any U.S. territory, and by proposing compensated emancipation (an offer Congress applied to Washington, D.C) in his early presidency. Lincoln stood by the Republican Party platform in 1860, which stated that slavery should not be allowed to expand into any more territories. Lincoln believed that the extension of slavery in the South, Mid-west, and Western lands would inhibit "free labor on free soil". In the 1850s, Lincoln was politically attacked as an abolitionist, but he did not consider himself one; he did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U.S. until the proposed 13th Amendment became part of his party platform for the 1864 election.
In 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd, daughter of a prominent slave-owning family from Kentucky. Lincoln returned to the political stage as a result of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and soon became a leading opponent of the "Slaveocracy"—that is the political power of the southern slave owners. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, written to form the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, included language, designed by Stephen A. Douglas, which allowed the settlers to decide whether they would or would not accept slavery in their region. Lincoln saw this as a repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise which had outlawed slavery above the 36-30' parallel.
During the American Civil War, Lincoln used the war powers of the presidency to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free" but exempted border states and those areas of slave states already under Union control. As a practical matter, at first the Proclamation could only be enforced to free those slaves that had already escaped to the Union side. However, millions more were freed as more areas of the South came under Union control.
Read more about Abraham Lincoln And Slavery: Youth, Legal and Political, Emancipation, Compensation, Colonization, Citizenship and Limited Suffrage, Views On African Americans
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“If he talks ambiguously—talks for his country with “buts” and “ifs” and “ands.””
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“When Abraham Lincoln penned the immortal emancipation proclamation he did not stop to inquire whether every man and every woman in Southern slavery did or did not want to be free. Whether women do or do not wish to vote does not affect the question of their right to do so.”
—Mary E. Haggart, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”
—Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)