Union and Slavery in Lincoln’s Words (Article 121)

From a young man until his death, Abraham Lincoln was committed to the concept of equal opportunity for all people and to the eternal values of the United States. Although his thoughts on preservation of the Union were formed as he entered adulthood, his thoughts on slavery were formed early as he was raised in a home by a father and mother (and step-mother) who all were opposed to slavery. Then, for the last thirty years of his life, he left a record of his commitment to those two ideals in speeches and letters. These are a few of the quotes by Abraham Lincoln on the peril of secession and the existence of slavery, which define his legacy.

On the role of government: “The legitimate object of government is to do for people what needs to be done, but which they cannot by individual effort do at all or not do so well for themselves such as making and maintaining roads and bridges, providing for the helpless, young and afflicted, common schools, and military and civil departments as necessary.”

As a young legislator, Lincoln said about an Illinois resolution to support fugitive slave laws: “We protest against the passage... we believe slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”

“Wherever slavery is, it has been first introduced without law - it is a monstrous injustice.” 

About a proposed compromise to allow the expansion of slavery to territories. “With this act, slavery becomes a Sacred right on the road to extension and Perpetuity.   It cannot stand, for no man is good enough to govern another man without his consent.  Even our friends in Southern states agreed in 1808 that slave trade across the waters was piracy - so how can selling a slave in this country be justified.”

 “The nation must decide about slavery because no country can exist, half slave and half free.” 

 “Indifference to slavery is really covert zeal for the spread of slavery that I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.  I hate it because it deprives (us) of our just influence and enables the enemies of freedom to taunt us as hypocrites.”

 Upon another attempt at compromise between slave holding and non-slave holding states: “Unless popular opinion makes itself sharply felt, and a change is made in our present course, blood will flow on account of Nebraska, and brother’s hand will be raised against brother.  We are from different principles but we are agreed, slavery must be kept out of Kansas.  This Nebraska act is usurpation- it would result in making slavery national.  No matter what will happen, we will say to the Southern Democrats, we won't go out of the Union and you shan't.” 

 To an allegation that non-slaveholding states were driving slave-holding states to secede: “Who are the true dis-Unionists, you or we? We, the majority in the Nation, would not strive to dissolve the Union, and if any attempt is made it must be by you, who so loudly stigmatize us as dis-Unionists. But the Union, in any event, will not be dissolved. We don't want to dissolve it, and if you attempt it, we won't let you.  With the purse and sword in our hands, you couldn't do it. We won't dissolve the Union and you shan't.” 

“A house divided against its self cannot stand, this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I leave you hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created equal.”

About the Dred Scott Supreme court decision that intended to perpetuate slavery: “The slavery question is more than political and more than territorial.  The Supreme Court decision was just one of a thousand things constantly done to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the Negro in every state of the Union. This is the “Special Problem” that vexed our writers of the Constitution.  It enters churches and makes the Methodists and Presbyterians divide their churches. This question of slavery has operated on the minds of men and divided them in every avenue of society, in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals. We cannot endure half slave, half free.” 

 “….the eternal struggle between right and wrong, the common right of humanity set against the divine right of Kings and tyrants. It is the same inhuman spirit that says, you work and toil and earn bread, and I will eat it.”

 “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”

 “This was our founders' lofty and wise and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures, yes, to all of His creatures, to the whole great family of man.  The founders knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants and so they established these great self-evident rules against the day when some man or some faction should set up a doctrine that none but rich men, or none but White men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that their posterity could look again to the Declaration of Independence to renew the battle our founders had started.”

 “Let us have faith that right makes might, and that in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

 “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong”, and “When a man argues in favor of it, I feel an impulse to see it tried on him.” 

 “You say slavery is good. As a good thing slavery is strikingly peculiar in this; that it is the only good thing, which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.”

 “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy….Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or equal hope, in the world?”

 “You have no oath to destroy the Union but I have a most Sacred oath to preserve and protect it.”

 “The issue of War, my fellow Countrymen, is in your hands.”

 To a newspaper editor who deliberately mis-stated a Lincoln position: “I have stated my principles many times, you must have read them, they will not change.  If papers like yours which have heretofore garbled what I have said will now fully and fairly place my thoughts before your readers, there can be no further misrepresentation.  I cannot shift ground.”

“I hold that the Union of these States is perpetual. No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union and acts of violence against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary.  I, therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution, the Union is unbroken and, to the extent of my abilities, I shall take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed in all of the states.  There needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none, unless it is forced upon the national authority.  If a minority will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which will divide and ruin them.  The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. 

 “In your hands, my dis-satisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War. This government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves, the aggressor.  You have no oath in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.  I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.  Those passions may have strained, but must not break, our bonds of affection.” 

 From the Gettysburg address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated can long endure. …It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.,,,”

 About securing votes in the House of Representatives for the Thirteenth Amendment:

“If not now when?” And, “I am the President of the United States, clothed with great power.  The abolition of slavery by Constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage but of unborn millions to come; a measure of such importance that these two votes must be procured.  I leave it up to you to determine how it shall be done.  I expect you to procure those votes.” And his representatives went out and secured enough votes for passage!

 In his Second Inaugural Address he urged the Northern citizens to be “sympathetic to our friends in the South” as there were no differences that could not be overcome and forgiven. He said: “We both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.... Let us judge not, that we not be judged, as the prayers of both cannot be answered...”

 Then in his only reference to the South's insistence  that slavery was a right, he said: “Yet if God wills that this war continue until all of the wealth piled up by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, so it must be said, as it was 3000 years ago, that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” 

 He concluded with the famous phrase: “With Malice toward none, with Charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are now in, to bind up the Nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and all nations.”

 Of course, even after over 150 years, we have not fully reached the aspirations Abraham Lincoln had for our country. There are still lingering racial issues and inequality, and there are vociferous arguments and even threats between the Federal Government and various states.

 Have we forgotten what that can lead to?

 And isn’t it worth our continuing to try to reach the ideals he envisioned.