Exploring Lincoln by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823265633
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Lincoln and the Struggle to End Slavery

Richard Striner

FOR A VERY LONG TIME, AMERICANS HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT Abraham Lincoln as a patriot above all else. Many see him as a quintessential “moderate”—a man who rescued our polity and saved our most precious institutions.

And there is surely much truth in this portrait. But there is quite a lot of truth left out of it. For Lincoln was more than just a patriotic Unionist, as most of his pre-presidential speeches and pronouncements (including his speeches in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and his “House Divided” speech) make abundantly clear. And his apparent moderation in the Civil War years was in some respects a disguise. Lincoln’s Unionism—transcendental though it sometimes appears—was contingent on America’s progress in phasing out slavery. And when it came to his long-term antislavery program, this American leader was brilliant to the point of audacity.1

There was a fiery and charismatic side to this man that is long overdue for analysis. In Lincoln the United States produced an extraordinary moral strategist—both fervent and Machiavellian—who saved the Union by changing it.

Lincoln constantly insisted in the 1850s that America should stop the geographical expansion of slavery. This program was a very real threat to the Southern way of life, so called. For with a quarantine placed around the slavery system, the free-state majority in Congress would grow toward a supermajority. That being the case, the final triumph of the antislavery movement would be very hard for Southerners to stop: a congressional supermajority (together with a supermajority of free states) could sweep aside Southern opposition and amend the Constitution to destroy the institution of slavery altogether. Consequently, it was Lincoln’s election itself—with his “free soil” pledge to prevent any further extension of slavery to western lands—that pushed the slave states into secession.

Lincoln’s earliest strategy for ridding the nation of slavery was incremental. “Phase One” was the containment of the evil. “Phase Two” would be a long-term phaseout program, a concept in many ways derived from the British antislavery method of the 1830s. Lincoln also (at least until 1864) supported the principle of voluntary colonization for blacks as a way to defuse the incendiary racial issue among the electorate. What he wanted, he explained more than once, was to phase out the evil of slavery and then let the races go their separate ways in peace.

Some observers, such as Lerone Bennett Jr., have argued that Lincoln was an overt racist. They cite his emphasis on colonization and they quote certain statements that he made in the 1850s—statements that in many ways sound like the talk of a man who harbored racial aversions.

But if Lincoln were a racist, we are left with a bit of a conundrum. For he denounced the oppression of blacks. In his famous Peoria speech of October 16, 1854, he pleaded with the whites in Illinois to acknowledge the truth that the “negro has some natural right to himself” and that “those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt, and death.

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