101 Things You Didn't Know About Lincoln by Brian Thornton

Author:Brian Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

53 Lincoln’s shifting views on abolitionism

Lincoln continued to put the Union above all else, even as his own personal views on slavery became more convicted. “If slavery isn’t a sin,” he said at one point, “nothing is.” In 1855, Lincoln read Sociology of the South, an ill-disguised apologist piece by Virginian slavery advocate George Fitzhugh. Lincoln kept copious notes as he read Fitzhugh, commenting at one point, “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.” Lincoln skewered Fitzhugh’s central argument that slave labor was preferable to free labor when he wrote, “The most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged.”

Later that same year, Lincoln despaired ever seeing a nonviolent resolution to the slavery issue, saying, “There is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” Southerners were so intractable in their defense of slavery, and Northerners so entrenched in their growing antipathy for it, that the “condition of the negro slave in America . is now so fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent.”

Yet, this was the able practitioner of politics as the “art of the possible.” The same man who, as president of the United States at the height of the Civil War, wrote to firebrand abolitionist newspaper editor Horace Greeley:

If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Lincoln always maintained that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a political expedient, and not out of a personal sense of outrage over slavery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.