Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln by Charles B. Strozier

Author:Charles B. Strozier [Strozier, Charles B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO011000, Biography & Autobiography/Presidents & Heads of State, HIS036050, History/United States/Civil War Period (1850-1877)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Lincoln was consistently antislavery. He said in 1864: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” That statement, made over a year after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and in the context of building political support for racial equality in America, to which he was then committed, may gloss over his ambivalence about race as it inevitably related to slavery. He said in a debate with Douglas in 1858:

I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in the favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race…. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.8

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