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LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ALBERT E. PILLSBURY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFUN COMPANY

1^ -^ (; 303, /^7

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HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
GIFT OF

i)AN 28 1932

Published Stptember tgis

This brief review of Abraham Lincoln's real atti-
tude toward Slavery and Emancipation originated
in an address delivered at Howard University
on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. It is now extended by the intro-
duction of historical evidence, principally from
Lincoln himself, which that occasion did not
permit. Apart from his conduct, which speaks
for itself to those who look beneath the surface
of it, nothing can contribute so much as his
own words to a true understanding of this great
American in the supreme act of his life and one
of the monumental events in the world's history.

Boston, September i, 1913.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

When the conflict between Freedom
and Slavery in this nation was ap-
proaching its crisis, in the struggle for
possession of the Nebraska territory,
a new and singular figure appeared at
the front of political battle in the West,
moved to the head of events, passed
across the world's stage, and in the
short space of seven years had vanished
from the sight of man.

Within such narrow bounds of time
lies a career the like of which is not
to be found in history. In the elements
of wonder and marvel, the story of
Abraham Lincoln's life and death is
without parallel or example. From the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

mean cabin in the Kentucky woods
to the final peak of transfiguration, it
moves in the successive acts of a great
tragic drama, reaching the high-water
mark of human achievement and sound-
ing every note in the gamut of human
emotion.

In the scant half-century since his
death, Abraham Lincoln has engrossed
more of the world's attention than any
other historic personage. Untiring re-
search has tracked him from the cradle
to the tomb. The remotest spot trodden
by his foot is explored, the last relative,
friend, or acquaintance examined for
any word or look of the great man,
every act of his life is studied, every
line of his written or spoken words put
under review, the last fragment of his
correspondence or memoranda is drawn

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

from its hiding-place or is on the way
to be, every trait of his character, every
mood of his mind, every feature or ex-
pression of his face, his figure, his pose,
his movement, is canvassed, printed,
and eagerly read, his biographers are
now becoming the subject of biography,
and the Lincoln literature overflows
the libraries day by day.

The materials now assembled tell us
vastly more about Lincoln and his true
relation to events than the people had
found out in his own time. All con-
temporary judgment of him is defective
for want of knowledge, and there is
much of it which history must now re-
ject. This plain American citizen was
one of the most complex and inscru-
table of all the great historic characters.
He was full of the oddest incongruities.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

By turns a man of jest and laughter
and again " dripping," as a friend said,
with melancholy; ranging in thought
and speech from unquotable plainness
to the heights of the human intellect; a
shrewd, practical lawyer and politician
dwelling among shadows, dreaming
dreams, seeing portents and feeling
mysterious influences that affected his
conduct; the most unpretentious of
men, set in the homeliest framework,
thinking with the power of Plato, seeing
with the eye of the Sibyl, speaking like
the Hebrew prophets. The story of his
life abounds in grotesque incident, al-
ways of the humanest character. The
strapping young giant of eighteen takes
upon his back a worthless drunkard,
perishing with cold, and totes him a
mile to shelter. The lawyer riding the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

circuit goes back upon his trail to pull
a hapless pig out of the mud or restore
young birds to their nest. The official
head of the nation, appealed to in the
public street by a maimed soldier, sits
down with him at the foot of the first
convenient tree to write an order for
his relief. The maker of an epoch
opens his cabinet council with a chap-
ter of Artemus Ward, and checks the
laughter to present the Emancipation
Proclamation.

Yet more strange and startling are
the dramatic shifts of scene and cir-
cumstance that attend the unfolding
of this unique character. The forlorn
backwoods boy turns out to be the ap-
pointed head of a great nation, in a
crisis affecting the fate of the world.
The obscure country lawyer reveals in

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

a phrase what a people is waiting to
hear, and becomes in a day the prophet
of the cause. The uncouth Westerner
from the prairies, unpracticed in arms
or in statecraft, outmasters the states-
men, outwits the diplomatists, gives
the generals their plan of campaign.
The unlettered man of the people
speaks lofty eloquence, soon to be-
come classic. The raw politician, who
never held public power for a day, takes
the helm of state when the ship is
already on the rocks, when all the
pilots and captains stand helpless and
appalled, to bring her in safety and tri-
umph through the storm. The awk-
ward clown, reviled and lampooned
over two continents, in four years is
canonized by mankind. Without ori-
gin, without training, without an ex-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ternal attraction, without a worldly
advantage, the meanly-born child of a
poor and shiftless emigrant makes his
way out of the wilderness to fix for all
time the eyes of the world as leader of
a people, liberator of the slave, de-
liverer of his country, and in another
turn of the kaleidoscope, to be num-
bered with martyrs and saints in glory
everlasting.

These are historical facts, but they
dazzle the imagination and disturb the
judgment. All through the web of this
life are woven threads of marvel and
mystery. People read about Lincoln
with a weird sense of the supernatural,
of something apart from human affairs.
They think of another Man of Sorrows,
and the journey from the manger to the
cross, the crime of Cain, the translation

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

of Elijah. Nothing in human biography
stirs the imagination like this. The man
of history is already become a man of
fable, and in some distant day learned
doctors will dispute whether Abraham
Lincoln was a real character or a hero
of tradition, belonging in limbo with
Romulus and King Arthur.

What was this man, that he has taken
such a marvelous hold upon the in-
terest of the world ? What was there
in him or about him that makes us dis-
trust our senses as we follow the steps
of his amazing progress? Do we see
him as he was, or do we see an image,
an aureole, a legendary figure ?

Abraham Lincoln is not a myth, nor
is he like any other man. A man of
destiny, if there is such a character in
history, a man of many mysteries, his

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

hold upon mankind is not a mystery.
He was a new type of man — "new
birth of our new soil/' an unspoiled
product of nature to whom all the world
is akin. History is full of personages
who strike the eye with great and illus-
trious deeds. Here is one of the fore-
most of them who stirs the heart with
every element of human sympathy.
More than this, he touches the uni-
versal instinct of freedom, a chord that
vibrates around the world. Abraham
Lincoln is forever identified with the
cause of human liberty. When all his
other greatness is forgotten, history
and legend will remember him as
emancipator of a race and martyr of
freedom.

For this he is receiving, and he will
continue to receive, the homage of the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

world. Does it belong to him ? Doubts
are cast upon his title, by indirection if
not directly. Was Abraham Lincoln a
moral hero, whose place is among the
foremost of mankind, or was he a mere
time-server, a mere Union-saver, wield-
ing power with the cold hand of po-
litical expediency, careless that the fate
of a race or of freedom itself might be
staked upon the issue, who came hesi-
tating and reluctant to Emancipation
and decreed the freedom of millions as
an unavoidable move in the game of
war? Which is the real Abraham Lin-
cohi?

There is a belated but persisting view
of this great character as a sort of sub-
limated politician, concerned only with
saving the Union, by any means at his
command, indififerent to the national

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

crime of slavery and willing to see it
continue if so the Union could be pre-
served. It originated in the complaints
of hot and impatient anti-slavery lead-
ers before Lincoln was firm in the
presidency, and is now taken up and
perpetuated by all the apologists for
slavery and rebellion. If this is a cor-
rect estimate of his character, he never
rose to the moral level of his own act of
emancipation, and the exaltation of such
a man into a world-hero is a delusion.

A profound question of right and
wrong underlies the rebellion and the
events that produced it, by which the
claim of Abraham Lincoln to the true
title of Emancipator must finally be tried.
We are now living in a generation that
never saw Freedom and Slavery facing

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

each other. It has become fashionable
to divert public attention from the mov-
ing cause of a bloody war, lest the
truth may offend some sensibilities or
mar some reputations. We are told
that the war, on the part of the South,
was a patriotic if misguided attempt to
vindicate the rights of the States, and
on the part of the North, a war for the
Union. In the interest of national har-
mony we must shut the skeleton slavery
into the closet and turn the key upon
it, politely ignoring historical truth. A
part of the popular perversion of history
is to make Lincoln appear indifferent
to slavery, and willing to save it if he
could save the Union. So shall the
reverence paid to his memory help to
cover the ancient guilt and justify the
new bondage of the oppressed race.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

What is the historical truth? From
1820 to the downfall of the rebellion,
every question of American politics
turned, directly or indirectly, upon slav-
ery. A war for vindication of state
rights? After 1833, when the illumined
logic of Webster and the grim front of
Andrew Jackson had disposed of nulli-
fication, the first fruit of the slave sys-
tem, the right of a state to secede from
the Union was, as Lincoln truly said,
no longer an open or debatable ques-
tion, and no state rights were ever in
dispute. The right to hunt slaves in the
free states, and to carry slavery into
free territory, were not state rights. If
they were rights at all, they were per-
sonal rights of the slaveholder. A war
for the Union? Nothing but slavery
ever threatened the Union. The South-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ern states did not make the war, nor the
Southern people. They were whipped
into it by a slaveholding oligarchy, that
never embraced a tenth of the white
population of the South but ruled the
majority with an iron hand in the in-
terest of the slave system. The war was
a slaveholders' rebellion, treasonably
waged against the United States for
the single purpose of establishing upon
this continent an independent slave-
empire. In Lincoln's words, it was "an
attempt, for the first time in the world,
to construct a new nation on the basis
of human slavery." It was a war about
slavery, and about nothing else. It ac-
complished the extinction of slavery,
and it accomplished nothing else. Wit-
ness the record, as written by the people
in the three Amendments of the Con-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

stitution, every line directed to secure
the freedom of the emancipated slave.

If slavery was a wicked system, a war
to perpetuate it was a twice-wicked
war. For the iniquity of slavery we
need not rely upon preachers or moral-
ists, or the universal opinion of all en-
lightened men and Christian nations.
It was openly confessed by the whole
American people when the United
States in 1820 joined with the other
great powers of the world in branding
the slave-trade as piracy and punishing
it with death. If any distinction can be
drawn between the guilt of the slave-
trader, a mere incident of the system,
and the guilt of the slaveholder, who
constituted the system, it is not in favor
of the slaveholder.

If Abraham Lincoln, alive to the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

moral aspect of slavery, seized the first
opportunity to strike it down as fatal to
the principles of justice and liberty on
which a restored or permanent Union
must depend, insisting that freedom
should be made universal for all time by
writing it into the Federal charter, he
was in truth the Emancipator. My pur-
pose is to recall some of the historical
evidences in which his true attitude to-
ward slavery and emancipation appears.

The contest between Freedom and
Slavery, breaking out openly in the ad-
mission of Missouri to the Union as a
slave state and temporarily suppressed
by the compromise forbidding slavery
north of the 36-30 line, was thenceforth
the only vital issue before the American
people. The slave-power, aggressive

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

and defiant, advanced with startling
strides through the annexation of Texas,
the Mexican war, the compromise-sur-
render of 1850, the repeal of the Mis-
souri compromise, the raid upon the
Nebraska territory then embracing
Kansas, and the Dred Scott manifesto
of the Supreme Court, a decree that
"went forth without authority and came
back without respect,'' declaring the
Federal Constitution a charter for slav-
ery in the free territories. This course
of events produced the Abraham Lin-
coln of history.

What had been the general attitude
toward slavery of the man who issued
the Emancipation Proclamation ? What
did Lincoln think about slavery before
he became a public character?

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

We need not hear him say, as he often
said, that he "always hated slavery/'
the words of a man slow to censure
and not a man of hate. It was Abraham
Lincoln who pronounced the completest
judgment against slavery ever put in
words. "If slavery is not wrong, noth-
ing is wrong.'' "I cannot remember,"
he says, " when I did not so think and
feel."

Was it the intuition of a spirited child
born into a system that degraded white
poverty even more than it degraded the
negro, or did it begin with the flatboat
trip to New Orleans, when slavery, wit-
ness John Hanks, "ran its iron into
him " at the first sight of the lash and
the auction-block ? His nearest friend
and biographer gives credit to the story,
curious and suggestive if true, that he

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

then and there said to his companions,
with an imprecation that rarely issued
from his lips, "Boys, if I ever get a
chance to hit that thing, I '11 hit it hard."
A forgotten lecture, produced by the
young Lincoln in his twenties, declares
the freeing of slaves to be one of the
highest objects of human achievement.
What put this into the head of the back-
woods youth in a pro-slavery commu-
nity? The burning of a negro by a St.
Louis mob stirred him to one of his
earliest speeches — on Liberty, the sub-
ject always uppermost in his mind — a
speech that has the added interest of
showing that Lincoln, like Webster,
began with a grandiloquent manner,
imitated from the spread-eagle oratory
of the period, before he developed his
own inimitable style.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

If Abraham Lincoln ever uttered a
word in extenuation of slavery, the fact
has not appeared in history. It needs
not his words to show how he felt to-
ward such a system. His whole life,
now open to the world, was an all-em-
bracing sympathy with the oppressed
and down-trodden that beat in every
pulsation of his heart. To hate slavery
was in his blood. It was a law of his
being.

What was Lincoln's attitude toward
slavery as a public character and po-
litical leader?

The first significant public act of his
life, in the Illinois legislature at the age
of twenty-eight, was the recorded pro-
test against resolutions asserting the
" sacred '' right of property in slav.es, a

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

claim which Lincoln always resented
as profanation. The protest, so moder-
ate that it now appears apologetic, was
then so bold that but one colleague
could be found to stand with him. Illi-
nois was still pro-slavery, with a "black
code " of unsparing severity, and but a
few years removed from an attempt to
make it a slave state. This was the year
of Lovejoy's murder by the Alton mob,
uncondemned and unpunished by Illi-
nois, when nothing but the timely ap-
pearance of Wendell Phillips saved
Faneuil Hall from capture by the apolo-
gists for that crime against humanity.

In his single term in Congress Lin-
coln stood with the most advanced op-
ponents of slavery, joining in all their
denunciations of the Mexican war,
which he stigmatized in his "spotreso-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

lutions'' then celebrated but now for-
gotten, voting " at least forty times," as
he said, for the Wilmot Proviso, and
finally introducing a bill to abolish slav-
ery in the District of Columbia. This
measure, wrenched out of the setting
of 1849 in which it belongs, has been
supposed to show a tenderness toward
slavery. Moderate and guarded as it
was, there is no doubt that Lincoln
risked his political future in presenting
it. As a direct step toward abolition in
the only place where slavery existed
within reach of Federal power, an act
finally accomplished after many years
only by stress of war, when it was Lin-
coln's privilege to seal it with his offi-
cial approval, it branded him in politics
as an abolitionist, and many of his friends
believed that his open hostility to slav-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ery had sacrificed all hope of political
advancement.

Indeed, when Lincoln returned from
Congress he seems to have regarded
himself as through with public affairs.
There are signs at this time of his tem-
peramental depression. The revelation
had not come to him. But the Compro-
mise of 1850 stirred him uneasily and
would not let him rest. He said to his
friend Stuart, "The time will come
when we must all be Democrats or
Abolitionists. When that time comes,
my mind is made up. The slavery ques-
tion can't be compromised.'' This set
him to brooding deeply upon slavery
and its bearing upon the fate of the na-
tion, on which it is now historic that
he became the clearest and prof oundest
thinker of his time. It took possession

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

of him. He "moused around the li-
braries," absorbing the history of the
institution and pondering every phase
of the subject in long fits of silent ab-
straction. A manuscript fragment of
this period, of which it is said that he
usually carried a hatful, goes to the
roots of slavery and gives a glimpse at
the working habit and logical precision
of his mind: —

"If A can prove, however conclu-
sively, that he may of right enslave B,
why may not B snatch the same argu-
ment and prove equally that he may
enslave A? You say A is white and B
is black. It is color, then; the lighter
having the right to enslave the darker?
Take care. By this rule you are to be
slave to the first man you meet with a
fairer skin than your own. You do not
mean color exactly? You mean the
whites are intellectually the superiors

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

of the blacks, and therefore they have
the right to enslave them? Take care
again. By this rule you are to be slave
to the first man you meet with an intel-
lect superior to your own. But, you say,
it is a question of interest, and if you
make it your interest, you have the right
to enslave another. Very well. And if
he can make it his interest, he has the
right to enslave you."

Lincoln's clear and direct intellect
went straight to the question whether
Slavery and Freedom can permanently
dwell together in the same house. In
this interval he read the horoscope of
slavery, and when he began to speak
out, it was like the voice of a prophet
denouncing the vision.

The threat to repeal the Missouri
Compromise, opening to slavery the ter-
ritory long pledged to freedom, aroused

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Lincoln once for all. From this time he
avowed his purpose to press the assault
against slavery to the limit of Federal
power, "until the sun shall shine, the
rain shall fall, the wind shall blow, upon
no man who goes forth to unrequited
toil.'' The Peoria speech of 1854, plainly
the product of deep thought and unfold-
ing for the first time Lincoln's matured
mental attitude, forecasts all his later
utterances in putting political opposi-
tion to slavery squarely upon the moral
ground, denouncing the iniquity of the
system and openly declaring, as the
final reason against it on which the bat-
tle must turn, that slavery is wrong. It
was the precursor of the celebrated
"lost speech" of 1856 at Bloomington,
and those who heard both declare that
on each occasion he was so wrought

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

up with his theme as fairly to "quiver
with emotion." Nothing ever stirred
Lincoln like slavery, the subject of all
his later speeches, or moved him to
such eloquence and depth of feeling.
Denouncing slavery as " the only thing
that ever endangered the Union," he
takes the field against it at Peoria in
utterances like these : —

"This declared indifference but, as I
must think, covert zeal for the spread
of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it
because of the monstrous injustice of
slavery itself. I hate it because it de-
prives our republican example of its
just influence in the world; enables the
enemies of free institutions with plausi-
bility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes
the real friends of freedom to doubt
our sincerity; and especially because it
forces so many really good men among
ourselves into an open war with the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

very fundamental principles of civil
liberty.''

"If the negro is a man, is it not to
that extent a total destruction of self-
government to say that he too shall not
govern himself? When the white man
governs himself, that is self-govern-
ment; but when he governs himself
and also governs another man, that is
more than self-government — that is
despotism. If the negro is a man, then
my ancient faith teaches me that all
men are created equal, and that there
can be no moral right in one man mak-
ing a slave of another.''

" No man is good enough to govern
another man without that other's con-
sent."

"The master not only governs the
slave without his consent, btit he gov-
erns him by a set of rules altogether dif-
ferent from those which he prescribes
for himself. Allow all the governed an

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

equal voice in the government; that,
and that only, is self-government.''

"Slavery is founded in the selfish-
ness of man's nature — opposition to it,
in his love of justice. These principles
are an eternal antagonism; and when
brought into collision so fiercely as
slavery extension brings them, shocks
and throes and convulsions must cease-
lessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Com-
promise — repeal all compromises — re-
peal the Declaration of Independence
— repeal all past history — still you
cannot repeal human nature."

"I particularly object to the new po-
sition which the avowed principle of
this Nebraska law gives to slavery in
the body politic. I object to it because
it assumes that there can be moral right
in the enslaving of one man by an-
other."

" Little by little, but steadily as man's
march to the grave, we have been giv-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ing up the old for the new faith. Near
eighty years ago we began by declar-
ing that all men are created equal; but
now from that beginning we have run
down to the other declaration that for
some men to enslave others is a ^ sacred
right of self-government.' These prin-
ciples cannot stand together. They are
as opposite as God and Mammon.''

"In our greedy chase to make profit
of the negro, let us beware lest we can-
cel and tear in pieces even the white
man's charter of freedom. Our repub-
lican robe is soiled and trailed in the
dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn
and wash it white in the spirit, if not
the blood, of the Revolution. Let us
turn slavery from its claims of ^ moral
right ' back upon its existing legal rights
and its arguments of ^ necessity.' "

Three years later, in a speech at
Springfield, he draws this picture : —

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

"In those days our Declaration of
Independence was held sacred by all,
and thought to include all; but now, to
aid in making the bondage of the negro
universal and eternal, it is assailed,
sneered at, construed, hawked at, and
torn, till, if its framers could rise from
their graves, they could not recognize
it. All the powers of the earth seem
rapidly combining against him. Mam-
mon is after him; ambition follows;
philosophy follows; and the theology
of the day is fast joining the cry. They
have him in his prison-house ; they have
searched his person and left no prying
instrument with him. One after another,
they have closed the heavy iron doors
upon him; and now they have him, as
it were, bolted in, with a lock of a hun-
dred keys, which can never be unlocked
without the consent of every key; the
keys in the hands of a hundred different
men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

stand musing as to what invention, in
all the dominions of mind and matter,
can be produced to make the impossi-
bility of his escape more complete than
it is.

Again, he answers to the bogey of
"negro equality," a ghost that never
could be laid and stalks abroad in its
most forbidding shape after half a cen-
tury of freedom: —

" I protest against the counterfeit logic
which concludes that because I do not
want a black woman for a slave, I must
necessarily want her for a wife."

"All I ask for the negro is that if
you do not like him, let him alone. If
God gave him but little, that little let
him enjoy."

" I hold that there is no reason in the
world why the negro is not entitled to
all the natural rights enumerated in the
Declaration of Independence, the right

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
ness. I hold that he is as much entitled
to these as the white man. I agree that
he is not my equal in many respects,
certainly not in color, perhaps not in
moral or intellectual endowment; but
in the right to eat the bread without the
leave of anybody else, which his own
hand earns, he is my equal and the equal
of every living man.''

Lincoln, the politician, was now speak-
ing apostolic words of freedom. Putting
polite phrases and compromising shifts
behind him, he brings slavery to the
bar of political opinion as a system of
iniquity, lifting the discussion into the
realm of morals and making an issue
which even a politician's conscience
cannot evade. The struggle between
Freedom and Slavery was now centered
upon Douglas's Nebraska bill. As the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

most conspicuous opponent of this meas-
ure, Lincoln took his stand upon the
moral wrong of the slave system, and
all the anti-slavery forces, then crystal-
lizing into a new and powerful political
party, had to follow and stand with
him upon that ground. The abolition-
ists had gone before him and done their
work, of which Lincoln himself may
have been a part. His bosom compan-
ion Herndon, an ardent disciple of
Garrison and Theodore Parker, de-
clared that Lincoln was " baptized into
the abolition church " on the occasion
of the Bloomington speech. The abo-
litionists had planted and watered, but
it remained to gather the increase.
They could not harvest in political con-
ventions or in the ballot-box the crop
which they had sown. At the oppor-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

tune moment, Lincoln appeared in the
field and hitched the moral forces of
abolition to the moving car of political
events.

Following the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, and while the battle was
still raging in Kansas, came the Dred
Scott declaration of the Supreme Court
that the Federal Constitution forbade
the exclusion of slavery from the free
territories. Lincoln's acute political
vision at once perceived that the same
doctrine, if carried a step farther, would
make slavery lawful in the free states.
He challenged the attention of the coun-
try to the new peril in that history-
making speech now memorable and
familiar : —

" * A house divided against itself can-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

not stand.' I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave
and half free. I do not expect the Union
to be dissolved; I do not expect the
house to fall; but I do expect it will
cease to be divided. It will become all
the one thing, or all the other. Either
the opponents of slavery will arrest the
further spread of it, and place it where
the public mind shall rest in the belief
that it is in the course of ultimate ex-
tinction, or its advocates will push it
forward till it shall become alike law-
ful in all the states, old as well as new,
North as well as South."

This was the trumpet calling to bat-
tle. Nothing like it had ever been heard
from a recognized political leader. It
antedated and outran Seward's "irre-
pressible conflict," and it came from a
man whose words were shaping the
course of momentous political events.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

This was Lincoln's response to the
Dred Scott declaration, and marks the
next line of his advance. Slavery is
irreconcilable not only with Union, but
with freedom in the free states. If it
goes on, it will become universal. The
time has come when the people must
set their house in order, by putting it in
course of extinction. The words mean
nothing less than this, and the bold and
startling figure drove the meaning home.
In this speech Lincoln fairly put slav-
ery on the defensive before the political
power of the nation. With a full sense
of its importance, he had consulted his
friends, who warned him against a dec-
laration so radical as to invite defeat.
To this Lincoln replied, "with strong
emotion,'' as we are told, "The time
has come when this should be said. If

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

I must go down, let me go down linked
to the truth. This nation cannot live on
injustice.'' To the reproaches that fol-
lowed the speech he rejoined, " If I had
to draw pen across my whole record
leaving one thing unerased, it should
be that speech. You will live to regard
it as the wisest thing I ever said.''

It is recorded that to those about
him Lincoln was now as one inspired.
"Sometimes," he says, "I seem to see
the end of slavery. I feel that the time
is soon coming. How it will come,
when it will come, by whom it will
come, I cannot tell, but that time will
surely come."

The debate with Douglas followed,
now classic in history and literature.
Was it chance or destiny that gave Lin-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

coin this opportunity ? The influence of
Douglas upon Lincoln's career is a curi-
ous episode in a life full of strange events.
Rivals in their early years at the bar,
rivals for the hand of a woman, rivals
in politics, and finally for the highest
political distinction, the revelation of
Abraham Lincoln to the country was
outwardly due to the circumstance that
his home was the home of Douglas. As
leader of the pro-slavery forces, author
and principal exponent of the Nebraska
bill, now engaged in a " squabble,'' as
Lincoln called it, with the titular head
of his party, and struggling to keep his
hold on Illinois and his place in the
Senate, Douglas held the center of the
political stage, in the fiercest light of
publicity. In this reflected light Lin-
coln first became visible to the nation,

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

as the only champion fit to enter the
lists against the most adroit, audacious,
and resourceful of all the protagonists
of slavery. After the great debate is
over, and after Douglas has gone down
in "the battle of i860,'' a whimsical fate
makes him reappear on the inaugural
platform at the Capitol, to publicly em-
phasize his position as a Union man,
where he takes upon himself the modest
office of holding Lincoln's hat while
that lifelong adversary is crowned with
the republican diadem.

Nothing in the annals of our political
forum but the meeting of Webster with
Hayne and Calhoun can be compared,
in the magnitude of its consequences, to
the contest of 1858. Douglas meant to
make his quarrel with Buchanan win
the battle for him, by dividing the anti-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Nebraska men. In this he would have
succeeded against any opponent less
wary and resolute than Lincoln, who
held him, with a grip that never re-
laxed, to the moral issue of the right or
wrong of slavery. Here Douglas was
fatally weak and foredoomed to ulti-
mate defeat. In an unguarded moment
he had dropped the remark that he did
not " care whether slavery is voted up
or voted down." The fatal persistence
with which he was held to this unhappy
admission is a striking example of Lin-
coln's skill and sagacity in managing
an argument or a cause. In the historic
question put to Douglas at Freeport,
whether the people of a territory can
in any lawful way exclude slavery, Lin-
coln again displayed the foresight and
courage of a great leader. Said his

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

friends, "If you put that question to
Douglas, he will beat you and win the
senatorship," to which Lincoln quietly
rejoined, "I am hunting larger game.
If he answers the question he can never
be president, and the battle of i860 is
worth a hundred of this." He had to
answer yes, or lose Illinois, and " of that
answer," as Herndon said, "Douglas
instantly died." Under the compelling
hand of the master politician, he had
flung away the South and rent the party
of slavery in twain.

Among Lincoln's gifts none, perhaps,
is more remarkable than his power of
forecasting the future. Did he already
see the destiny that was opening before
him? The significance of this answer
to his friends is almost unmistakable.
Did he already see the slave-power

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

disintegrated and broken, the champion
of freedom in this debate at the head of
the party of freedom in " the battle of
1860/' and prevailing victorious over a
divided enemy? This is not incapable
of belief, but he made no sign. It turned
out to be the course of history. When
the contest of 1858 was over, Lincoln
had lost the senatorship to Douglas
and Douglas had lost the presidency to
Lincoln, who had bagged the " larger
game '' and won the mighty opportunity
of reconsecrating the Union to free-
dom.

Rarely has oratory raised a more
striking monument to its own power
than in the utterances of Lincoln, made
without a thought of oratorical effect,
from the political stump. Before the

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

encounter with Douglas, he was a man
untried, and beyond the bounds of a
single state, almost unknown. In two
years, a dozen speeches had put him at
the head of the nation. There were
qualities in Lincoln's words, public or
private, that made him unforgettable.
His lips dropped apologues and apo-
thegms. He would put an argument
into a barbed arrow of speech that went
straight to its mark and stuck there. His
remorseless logic could " snake a soph-
ism out of its hole,'' as John Hay said,
with a deadlycertainty of which no other
political leader of his time was capable.
Take from the speeches against the ex-
tension of slavery a single example of apt
and biting illustration that forecloses
all debate: —

"If I saw a venomous snake crawling

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

in the road, any man would say I might
seize the nearest stick and kill it ; but if
I found that snake in bed with my chil-
dren, that would be another question.
I might hurt the children more than
the snake. Much more, if I found it in
bed with my neighbor's children, and I
had bound myself by a solemn compact
not to meddle with his children under
any circumstances. But if there was a
bed newly made up, to which the chil-
dren were to be t^en, and it was pro-
posed to take a batch of snakes and put
them there with the children, I take it
no man would say there was any ques-
tion how I ought to decide."

He demolished the whole argument
of Douglas in a couple of sententious
phrases that could not be answered or
dislodged from the public mind. " Pop-
ular sovereignty,'' he said, " means that
if one man chooses to make a slave of

another man, neither that man nor any

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

other man shall have a right to object.'^
When he had forced from Douglas the
opinion, in the face of the Dred Scott
case, that slavery could be excluded
from the territories, he summed up the
position in a dozen words that made
further protestation a vain beating of
the air. "Douglas holds that slavery
may lawfully be driven away from a
place where it has a lawful right to
stay.''

Yet no arts of speech or genius for
debate could have given Lincoln his
primacy, or his hold upon the people,
without the moral power and depth of
conviction revealed in the lofty utter-
ances to which he often rose, as in the
letter to the Boston men on Jefferson's
birthday: —

"He who would be no slave must

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

consent to have no slave. Those who
deny freedom to others deserve it not
for themselves, and under a just God,
cannot long retain it."

What was Lincoln's attitude and pur-
pose toward slavery as he approached
the presidency?

This was a question of deep interest
to the political leaders, as they saw this
untried man about to assume the exec-
utive power of the nation. The best
source of authentic information was
Herndon, Lincoln's law-partner, him-
self a remarkable character and closer
to Lincoln for many years than any
other. To the inquiries of a Massachu-
setts senator, Herndon responded with
this portrait, now of historic fidelity: —

"Lincoln is a man of heart, — aye,
as gentle as a woman's and as tender, —

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

but he has a will strong as iron. He
loves all mankind, hates slavery and
every form of despotism. Put these to-
gether — love for the slave, and a de-
termination, a will, that justice, strong
and unyielding, shall be done when
he has the right to act, and you can
form your own conclusion. Lincoln will
fail here, namely, if a question of po-
litical economy — if any question comes
up which is doubtful, questionable,
which no man can demonstrate, then
his friends can rule him; but when on
Justice, Right, Liberty, the Government,
the Constitution, and the Union, then
you may all stand aside : he will rule
then, and no man can move him — ho
set of men can do it. This is Lincoln,
and you mark my prediction.''

On his journey to the Capital, Lin-
coln said to the people of Philadelphia
at Independence Hall : —

"I have never had a feeling politically

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

that did not spring from the truths em-
bodied in the Declaration of Independ-
ence, which gave liberty not alone to
this country but to the world in all
future time. If the country cannot be
saved without giving up that principle,
I would rather be assassinated on the
spot than surrender it.''

These words, of wide currency and
often misquoted or misunderstood, are
of significance enough to be recalled in
their true meaning. It was not the com-
mon bathos, of which Lincoln was in-
capable, that he would forfeit his life to
save the country. He would be assassi-
nated rather than to save the country by
surrendering the principle of liberty.

No more appalling vista ever met the
eye of ruler or statesman than opened
before Abraham Lincoln when he en-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

tered upon the presidency. As he feel-
ingly said, "Without a name, perhaps
without a reason why I should have a
name, there has fallen upon me a task
such as did not rest even upon the
Father of his Country.'' He found the
government crumbling under his feet.
The South was already in arms, and
seven states had repudiated their alle-
giance to the Union. In his own words
of prophecy, soon fulfilled. Freedom
and Slavery could no longer dwell to-
gether, and the house divided against
itself was reeling upon its foundations.
In this hour of supreme trial did Abra-
ham Lincoln forget that slavery was
wrecking the Union which he was now
solemnly sworn to preserve ?

As well might he forget the earth on
which he trod. He knew that behind

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

the mask of rebellion was no face but
that of the slave-power. His conviction
was proclaimed and known that slavery
and the Union could not survive to-
gether, and it was now his charge to
save the Union. He saw the approach-
ing doom of slavery as a sacrifice to the
Union. In the interval after his election,
while a panic-stricken Congress was on
its knees before Secession and the peo-
ple were little better, he had been urg^
ing influential leaders to " hold firm as
a chain of steel " against further com-
promise with slavery. "Have none of
it," he says. "The tug has to come,
and better now than later." He insisted
that no foot of free soil should be
thrown as a sop to the slave-power.
" On this," he said, " I am inflexible."
He rejected the imputation that he

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

should be thought "willing to barter
away the moral principle involved in
this contest for the commercial gain of
a new submission to the South." Fore-
seeing that the menace of war would
invite or impel the giving of new bonds
to slavery, he privately put into the
hands of friends in Congress a series
of proposals designed to forestall the
movement, by preventing any new and
substantial concessions. There is little
doubt that his influence, if not his hand,
appears in the constitutional amend-
ment adopted by Congress on the eve
of his inauguration, an historical frag-
ment which disappeared in the tumult
of war and is now forgotten. For the
credit of the nation, this deserves to be
remembered for what it does not con-
tain. Of all the invitations to peace, this

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

is the most inconsequential. It was de-
signed to write into the Constitution
the accepted dogma that Federal power
cannot molest slavery within the states
where it already exists, and to do no
more. The Dred Scott doctrine is nei-
ther adopted nor recognized, Congress
is left as free as it was before to forbid
slavery in the territories, suppress the
interstate slave-trade or repeal the fu-
gitive-slave law, and the same power
that makes the amendment can unmake
it in the future. There is recently dis-
closed evidence, from his own hand,
confirming the belief that Lincoln's un-
seen interference at this stage was a
large, perhaps decisive, factor in sav-
ing the nation from the ignominy of the
Crittenden compromise or other surren-
der to the slave-power. By the aid of his

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

influence this was averted and slavery
held at bay to meet the chances of war.

The clue to Lincoln's course toward
slavery as president is long open, and
there is no higher proof of his wisdom
or courage. He had now exchanged
the freedom of political debate for the
responsibilities of power and constitu-
tutional obligation. He was acting a
mighty part in the face of the world.
Every word must be weighed and every
act deliberated. He had to move with
caution where a single misstep might
be fatal. He had to temporize, and there
were occasions when he had to dis-
semble. Appearing weakest where he
was really greatest, he was misunder-
stood, and the error persists in the
face of history.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

He realized in the beginning that all
must depend upon a united North. The
loyal states were honeycombed with
the timid or craven and the open sym-
pathizers with rebellion. So conspicu-
ous a personage as Franklin Pierce had
written the rebel leader that blood would
flow in our own streets at any attempt
to coerce the South. The president must
steer a course which all the loyal peo-
ple would follow, or the cause was
hopeless. What might appear like weak-
ness under other conditions was now
imperative necessity. He could lead
only while appearing to follow. In-
flexible adherence to this course com-
pelled him to do or forbear much that
provoked hostile criticism from the ex-
tremists of all views. Denounced on
the one hand as afraid to strike at slav-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ery, and on the other as waging an abo-
lition war, he had to keep the peace
with Union men of all shades of opin-
ion, that they might be held together
in support of the cause. He had quali-
ties that were equal to the task. The
anti-slavery radicals scourged him with
whips and the pro-slavery party with
scorpions, and he submitted in silence
and without complaint, serenely confi-
dent in his purpose. He had a divine
gift of patience, a "saving common
sense" that moved by one step at a
time, and a courage that could resist
his own impulses no less than the cla-
mor of factions. With supreme self-
control, and a wisdom that seems in-
spired, he kept his own counsel and
awaited his time.

All this is now familiar history.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

There is no point in his career where
Lincoln's genius as a leader of men
rises higher or marks him more unmis-
takably as the man of the crisis, and
through all this period there is no evi-
dence that his hand was ever stayed by
indecision or infirmity of purpose. He
was moving steadily, in his own way,
to the extinction of slavery.

From the first note he struck, in his
inaugural address, he was misunder-
stood because he was not compre-
hended. The radical anti-slavery leaders
thought they saw a disposition to further
compromise, the men of fighting blood
a want of courage or resolution. They
did not know the man. The address was
essentially a piece of political strategy,

of the highest order, in which Lincoln

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

met the occasion with the far-sighted
wisdom that was peculiarly his own.
He could not but foresee that his appeal
for peace was addressed to deaf ears
and would be rejected. His principal
task that day was to put the cause of
the Union in the right and Secession in
the wrong, before the country and the
world, at the threshold of the impend-
ing conflict, and this he did, with the
hand of the master.

Of the two mighty problems that
confronted Lincoln in dealing with the
rebellion, the military and the political,
the latter was more complicated and
delicate if not more diflScult, and of this
the slavery question was principally a
part. Under strict official responsibil-
ity he had to feel his way through a

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

maze of constitutional doubts and dis-
putes so complex that it was never un-
raveled. He would have been politically
justified in leaving slavery to the course
and chance of events. As president, he
had no civil power over it. As com-
mander-in-chief of the armed forces, he
could lay hands upon it only as a neces-
sary act of war if emancipation should
become essential to military success.
His right to interfere with slavery at
all was challenged and disputed. So
pronounced an anti-slavery man as
Seward, the head of his cabinet, was
afraid of it, and advised him to leave it
alone. He was loudly warned from the
North to leave it alone. Lincoln neither
hesitated nor delayed. No sooner were
the necessary military operations on foot
than he began to formulate plans to-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ward the extinction of slavery. In the
District of Columbia, within the con-
trol of Congress, the way was plain.
Far more important than this were the
border slave states, wavering between
loyalty and treason but still remaining
in the Union. That it was vitally neces-
sary to keep them there Lincoln be-
lieved and all men agreed. They were
no less devoted to slavery, as the event
proved, than the states already in rebel-
lion. Nevertheless, Lincoln proceeded
to urge upon them a scheme of com-
pensated abolition, which he never for-
bore while any hope of success remained,
pleading with them like a father with
his children, with many significant in-
timations that compulsory emancipation
might be the consequence of refusal.
It was to no purpose. Their attachment

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

to slavery was so strong that they would
not give it up. In April, 1862, this
measure was indorsed by Congress, but
events were then moving too swiftly
and compensated abolition was left be-
hind.

Written history has strangely missed
the true significance of this episode.
Anxious as Lincoln was to hold the
allegiance of the border states, why
should he go aside to press upon them
an unpalatable scheme of abolition, at
the risk of stimulating their natural
sympathy with the other slave states to
a degree that might imperil their ad-
herence to the Union?

The question admits of but one an-
swer. Profoundly convinced that slav-
ery and the Union could not survive
together, Lincoln realized from the be-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ginning that the extinction of slavery
was as necessary to a restored Union
as the winning of battles. His appeal
to the border states, charged against
him as temporizing with slavery, is the
first open and unmistakable evidence of
his purpose to make an end of it He
began in the localities where it could
be reached by peaceful means, clearly
within his power. To treat with these
states for voluntary abolition would not
divide or imperil the North. If he suc-
ceeded, he would divide the South, ex-
tinguish slavery in a third of its domain,
and fatally undermine the whole sys-
tem. If he failed, the failure would go
to justify compulsory emancipation.
This is the indisputable meaning of his
conduct, confirmed, as we shall see, by
the testimony of his own words.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Lincoln's interference with military
commanders in dealing with escaped
slaves, his "revocation/' as it is still
called, of Fremont's proclamation of Au-
gust 30, 1 86 1, the recalling of Cameron's
report of December, 1 861, on the arming
of the black refugees, and the annulling
of Hunter's order of May, 1862, brought
upon him a storm of hostile criticism.
In each case he took the only proper
course, for which he had the unanswer-
able reasons. The military power over
slavery was still in dispute, the military
necessity on which it must stand was
not established, — and this Lincoln after-
ward declared to be his principal reason
for delay, — the people were not yet pre-
pared for emancipation, as the event
proved, and a subject involving such
, vast political consequences belonged to

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

the head of the government and not to
generals in the field. There must be
one uniform policy, for the army and
the country. He did not revoke Fre-
mont's proclamation, but modified it to
conform to the Confiscation Act. In re-
voking Hunter's order he pointedly
declares that he "reserves to himself"
the question of military emancipation,
and here again he appeals to the border
states to abolish slavery under the Com-
pensation Act, with a direct admoni-
tion to heed "the signs of the times.'^
He warned Congress and the country
in his message of December, 1861, and
elsewhere, in words of unmistakable
import, that " all indispensable means "
must be employed to preserve the Union.
Inthelightofwhatfollowed,itisplainthat
he was pointing toward emancipation.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

For all his shortcomings, as they
were regarded, and especially for his
delay in striking at slavery with the
sword of military power, the impatient
but undiscerning radicals poured out
the vials of their wrath upon him, and
multiplied the troubles to which only
infinite patience could submit. His acts
and omissions were public. As every
word he spoke was heard by the enemy,
North and South, his motives and pur-
poses could not be disclosed. Conduct
born of a wisdom superior to their own
was ascribed to reluctance or irresolu-
tion by a people who had not found
him out. He told the cabinet one day
a story of a man who always pretended
to be insane when beset by his cred-
itors, and significantly said, " On more
than one occasion I have been com-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

pelled to appear mad.'' It is one of the
oddities of this singular career that the
only scar borne upon the person of
the Emancipator was at the hand of a
negro and the only lasting impeachment
of his character the work of the most
zealous opponents of slavery.

The impatient temper of Horace
Greeley could not await the cautious
but sure-footed steps of the great presi-
dent toward the freeing of the slaves.
His "Prayer of Twenty Millions/' in
the Tribune, drew from the president
a public reply, under date of August
22, 1862, in which appears the much-
quoted, misunderstood, and perverted
declaration, " If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave, I would do
it." Of all the supposed evidences of

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Lincoln's willingness to save slavery,
this is the most persistent, and in the
light of events, the least significant. If
it ever afforded any justification for
such a view of Lincoln, it was but for
a day.

It has long been known that Lin-
coln's purpose of emancipation became
a fixed resolve not later than July,
1862. As early as June 18 he had
privately read to the vice-president
what is supposed to have been the first
sketch of the Proclamation, and about
the same time this was shown to an-
other confidential friend. On the vessel
returning from Hampton Roads, July
10, he was at work upon this or another
draft. Two days later he urged his last
appeal upon the border-state men to
abolish slavery with compensation, but

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

in vain. The situation was now vastly
different from that of the previous year.
In the lurid light of war, the dullest eye
was beginning to see that slavery was
the backbone of the rebellion. Every
soldier's grave was a new testimony
against it. The swift movement of events
furnished proof that the public feeling
against slavery had risen from day to
day. In one of the early speeches Lin-
coln had prefigured the peaceful ex-
tinction of slavery as the task, perhaps,
of a hundred years, but now a year of
war had done the work of a century.
In this interval the black republics of
Hayti and Liberia were recognized, a
treaty concluded with Great Britain for
effectual suppression of the slave trade
— which Seward declared to be "the
great act of this administration" — Con-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

gress had abolished slavery in the Dis-
trict of Columbia, excluded it from the
territories in the face of the Dred Scott
doctrine, thus finally disposed of, prac-
tically annulled the fugitive-slave law
and superseded the unwieldy Confisca-
tion Act of 1 86 1 by declaring escaped
slaves free as captives of war and eligi-
ble for military service. The popular
approval of these measures seemed to
warrant the president in believing that
the people would now accept a general
emancipation, McClellan warned him
that an abolition policy would disinte-
grate the armies in the field, but he
passed this admonition without notice.
On July 13 he privately disclosed to
Seward and Welles his purpose to de-
cree emancipation. To the assembled
cabinet, on July 22, he presented the pre-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

liminary proclamation, declaring that
he did not seek their advice upon eman-
cipation, as he was resolved upon it,
but only suggestions of form or detail.
Evidently he was prepared to issue the
proclamation at once. The cabinet fa-
vored Seward's suggestion to wait for a
military success, when the edict might
go out upon a wave of popular enthu-
siasm. The president concurred, and
this delayed its issue until the repulse
of Lee at Antietam.

The truth, then, is that at the mo-
ment when Lincoln penned the letter
to Greeley, August 22, he was with-
holding, in deference to his advisers,
the settled decree of emancipation, wait-
ing only for the wings of victory on
which a month later it went forth to
the world.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Remarkable as Lincoln was for tak-
ing the people into his confidence when
he could, he was always able, through
good and evil report, to keep his own
counsel when he must Later than the
Greeley letter, and but a week before
the proclamation appeared, a delega-
tion of clergymen came to urge imme-
diate emancipation. He submitted to
their reproaches, giving no hint of the
true situation, and indeed suggesting
obstacles in the way of their desire.
The disappointed friends of freedom
returned home to meet the proclama-
tion in the newspapers.

Those who point to the Greeley let-
ter, or other fancied evidences that
Lincoln was willing to save slavery,
are ignorant of the historical facts or
too little to comprehend them. The

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

letter is but another proof of Lincoln's
genius for managing men and events.
Already resolved upon emancipation,
for which he must have the people with
him, he seized the occasion of Gree-
ley's protest to make a public declara-
tion which would help to disarm the
conservatives of the North against the
policy of freedom which he was about
to proclaim, as he had disarmed the
border states against it by the offer of
compensation. It was pure hypothesis
to say that he would save the Union if
he could without freeing a slave. With
equal truth, and as little significance, he
might have said that he would save the
Union if he could without sacrificing a
man in battle. Thousands of slaves were
already freed, by course of war, as thou-
sands of men were fallen in the field.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

We know that Lincoln realized from
the beginning the futility of trjdng to
save the Union with slavery, and he
knew, when he wrote the Greeley let-
ter, that he was about to proclaim eman-
cipation. In the light of these facts,
the letter can bear no other meaning
than that which obviously it bore to
Lincoln himself. In the letter to Robin-
son, of August, 1864, he says: —

" It is true, as you remind me, that in
the Greeley letter of 1862 I said: * If I
could save the Union without freeing
any slave, I would do it.'/. . . I con-
tinued in the same letter: * 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 when-
ever I shall believe what I am doing
hurts the cause; and I shall do more

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

whenever I shall believe doing more
will help the cause.' • • . When I after-
ward proclaimed emancipation and em-
ployed colored soldiers, I only followed
the declaration just quoted from the
Greeley letter that ^I shall do more
whenever I shall believe doing more
will help the cause/ ''

Pending the final act of emancipa-
tion, the president submitted to Con-
gress a plan of constitutional abolition,
immediately securing the freedom of
all slaves emancipated by the events of
war, and authorizing a national sub-
sidy, with compensation to loyal own-
ers, upon voluntary abolition by the
states, "Without slavery the rebellion
could never have existed — without
slavery it could not continue.'' This is
the text of a full discussion of the sub-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

ject " in its economical aspect,'' rising
at the close to these words of eloquent
entreaty : —

"The fiery trial through which we
pass will light us down, in honor or
dishonor, to the latest generation. We
say we are for the Union. The world
will not forget that we say this. We
know how to save the Union. The
world knows that we know how to save
it. We — even we here — hold the
power and bear the responsibility. In
giving freedom to the slave we assure
freedom to the free — honorable alike
in what we give and what we preserve.
We shall nobly save or meanly lose the
last best hope of earth. Other means
may succeed; this could not fail. The
way is plain, peaceful, generous, just —
a way which, if followed, the world will
forever applaud and God must forever
bless."

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

Lincoln already saw what his im-
patient critics had not yet perceived,
that the extinction of slavery could be
made final and complete only by writ-
ing it into the Federal Constitution.
The Proclamation would free the slaves
to the extent of military power, but it
could not make slavery unlawful in a
single state. To accomplish this end,
and possibly hasten the return of peace,
he would subsidize voluntary abolition,
and temper the blow to slaveholders
who adhered to the Union. But popular
excitement, fed by the preliminary proc-
lamation, was now running too high for
this. Nothing followed from his appeal
but fresh denunciation of the compensa-
tion scheme, by fiery spirits who would
risk the freedom of the slave rather than
pay ransom for his deliverance.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

At the day appointed for the final
act, the president was ready. It was not
an auspicious time. The proclamation
of September, welcomed with shouts
of acclaim by the abolitionists and by
some of the enfranchised race, was so
coldly received by the country that the
great states had]turned against the presi-
dent in the ensuing elections. It was
yet doubtful whether the people were
equal to the policy of freedom, and our
arms were now under the shadow of a
bloody defeat. Clouds and darkness
were before him, but the die was cast
and Lincoln could not hesitate. The
final decree went forth in the Emanci-
pation Proclamation of January i, 1863,
making the day forever illustrious in
the annals of mankind. The new birth
of the American nation into real free-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

dom marked the final disappearance
of chattel slavery from the Christian
world.

Whatever were the limitations upon
the legal operation or effect of the
proclamation, Lincoln believed it to be,
as history has pronounced it, the death-
blow of slavery. From this time he
stood to it firmly as an act accomplished,
making its full observance a condition
of every future step toward peace.
Throughout the critical years of battle
that followed, he rejected with indig-
nant scorn all intimations that slavery
might yet be rehabilitated. "There have
been men base enough,'' he said, "to
propose to me to return to slavery our
black warriors of Port Hudson and
Olustee, Should I do so, I should de-
serve to be damned in time and eternity."

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

When the question of his renomination
came on, he characteristically said, "It
won't make much difference who is
president if pledged to emancipation
and negro soldiers." The appalling
slaughter of the 1864 campaigns brought
on a peace movement, with intimations
that slavery might be restored, upon
which the president, then reelected for
a second term, shuts the book in his last
message to Congress with these de-
cisive words : —

"I repeat the declaration made a
year ago, that while I remain in my
present position I shall not attempt to
retract or modify the Emancipation
Proclamation, nor shall I return to slav-
ery any person who is free by the terms
of that proclamation or by any of the
Acts of Congress. If the people should,
by whatever mode or means, make it

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

an executive duty to reenslave such
persons, another, and not I, must be
their instrument to perform it/'

In the letter to Hodges, of April,
1864, an historical document of the first
importance, Lincoln has left a record
of the mental process by which he
reached emancipation. He always felt
the wrong of slavery, he says, but —

" I understood that in ordinary civil
administration my oath forbade me to
practically indulge my primary abstract
judgment on the moral question of
slavery. . . . And I aver that to this
day I have done no official act in mere
deference to my abstract judgment and
feeling on slavery. I did understand,
however, that my oath to preserve the
Constitution imposed upon me the duty
to preserve, by every indispensable
means, that government, that nation, of

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

which the Constitution was the organic
law. . . • I felt that measures other-
wise unconstitutional might become
lawful by becoming indispensable to
the preservation of the Constitution
through the preservation of the nation.
Right or wrong, I assumed this ground
and now avow it. . . . When in March
and May and July, 1862, I made earnest
and successive appeals to the border
states to favor compensated emancipa-
pation, I believed the indispensable ne-
cessity for military emancipation and
arming the blacks would come unless
averted by that measure. ... In tell-
ing this tale I attempt no compli-
ment to my own sagacity. I claim not
to have controlled events, but con-
fess plainly that events have controlled
me."

There is some of Lincoln's character-
istic self-effacement in this, but the
meaning is plain. If it adds little to

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

what a discerning eye can read from
the course of his conduct, it is his own
testimony. Restrained by imperative
official obligations, he is still looking
for ground on which to stand in over-
throwing slavery. Indispensable mili-
tary necessity is such a ground. With-
out waiting for military necessity, he
tries to begin the process of extermina-
tion by negotiating for voluntary aboli-
tion in the border states. When this
attempt fails, he accepts the result as
establishing military necessity, and is-
sues the Proclamation.

The military necessity was strenu-
ously denied at the time. Indeed, a
numerous party maintained to the end
that the whole proceeding was an un-
warranted and unlawful usurpation of
power. As a purely military question,

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

it probably must be conceded that no
compelling military necessity for eman-
cipation was then, if it was ever, estab-
lished. Upon the degree of necessity
Lincoln had the right to exercise his
own judgment, and he cast it in favor
of liberty. If he was controlled by
events, they were events which his own
hand had helped to set in motion.

The germ of the Emancipation Proc-
lamation was in the " divided house "
speech of 1858. That bold and startling
utterance had a far-reaching influence
upon Lincoln's career, and upon the
course of history. If the slave-power had
any pretext for secession or the appeal
to arms in 1 861, it was that Lincoln, as
a political leader, had changed the front
of the victorious party toward slavery

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

from ^ssive toleration to open hostility,
and put the North in an attitude that
not only made any further extension of
slavery impossible, but fairly endan-
gered its permanent existence in the
states. Seeing the full import of the
Dred Scott doctrine if accepted as a rule
of political action, Lincoln had warned
the people, with prophetic insight and
solemnity, that the nation must become
all slave or all free. The warning went
home, and the people had called the
prophet to the chair of state. The slave-
power read the omen, and saw with the
swift instinct of self-preservation, what
Lincoln himself must have anticipated,
that the seed now sown would bear fruit
of an irresistible political movement, in
some form, toward the extinction of
slavery. The system was now besieged

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

in its own house. There might have
been a capitulation on terms that would
not involve bloodshed or ruin, but the
slave-power threw away its opportunity.
Under the Constitution, the peaceful
extinction of slavery could be accom-
plished only by shutting it up in the
states and leaving it to a lingering death
by natural decay, hastened, perhaps, by
suppression of the interstate slave-trade
and repeal of the fugitive-slave law,
or by persuading the South to accept
compensated abolition. The slave-
power, blind with passion, did not see
that armed rebellion would put in Lin-
coln's hand the sword by which slavery
could be destroyed at one stroke as a
necessary act of war. And so it was
done.

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

By Lincoln's procurement, the Thir-
teenth Amendment was made the fea-
ture of the party convention and plat-
form of 1864. Under this impetus, and
the urgent appeal of his last message to
Congress, it finally passed that body
January 31, 1865. It is known that he
exhausted his personal influence, and he
was charged with straining his oflicial
power, to insure its success. There is
some authority for the story, not inca-
pable of belief, that when the Amend-
ment was stalled in the House, the pres-
ident sent for a friendly leader and
said to him, " The amendment must be
passed. In this office I have great power.
The amendment must be ^passed. Say
no more, but go and pass it." A jubilant
crowd came to serenade him at the
White House upon the event. " This is

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

the king's cure," he said, "for all the
evils. It winds the whole thing up."
The doom of slavery was sealed, but the
war was not over, nor the Union re-
stored. A few days later, upon his
return from the conference at Hamp-
ton Roads, Lincoln again attempted a
shorter step toward peace with univer-
sal emancipation, in a plan presented to
the cabinet for a subsidy to all the slave
states upon submission to the national
authority and ratification of the Amend-
ment. To his open disappointment,*this
met with no favor. It included a gen-
eral pardon to rebellion, which few but
Lincoln himself would have favored at
that stage, and bore an appearance of
purchasing the peace now soon to be
conquered. Whatever may be thought
of this magnanimous proposal, the evi-

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

dence remains that peace and the com-
plete extinction of slavery were alike
the objects foremost in his mind. The
title of Lincoln as the Emancipator fests
no more upon the Proclamation than
upon his fixed resolve to write univer-
sal freedom into the Federal Constitu-
tion on the crest of the wave of public
sentiment, before it could recede and
leave the Amendment stranded.

Nothing in Abraham Lincoln's his-
tory stands out more plainly than the
compelling motive of his public career.
It was antipathy to slavery. This brought
him out of retirement, at the threat to
enslave the Nebraska territory, and
devoted him to the cause from which
he was never permitted to look back.
To no abolitionist was slavery more

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

abhorrent than it was to Lincoln, not
only for its iniquity, but because it en-
dangered the Union, The Constitution,
which Garrison's inspired wrath de-
nounced in fhe fiery words of Isaiah as
" a covenant with death and agreement
with hell," Lincoln accepted, with all
its obligations. The abolitionists, whose
appeal was addressed only to the public
conscience, had no direct and practical
remedy for the national evil. Lincoln,
at once a moralist, a profound and far-
sighted politician and statesman, and a
lover of the Union, looked for a remedy
and saw that there could be but one.
Slavery must be put on the way to its
end, by means consistent with the Con-
stitution and the Union. The first step
was to arrest its expansion ; the next, to
prepare the public mind for ultimate

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

extinction, on the principle that a nation
cannot endure half slave and half free.
Thus far had he advanced when the
power that rules over men and nations
opened a shorter way. Every fact of
his history points to the belief that, but
for the intervention of secession and
war, he would have followed with a
national scheme of compensated aboli-
tion. Historical monuments that cannot
be effaced mark the line on which he
moved from 1854 to the end of his life,
Lincoln hated slavery. He saw and pro-
claimed that slavery must destroy the
Union or be itself destroyed. He was
devoted to the Union. Slavery made
war upon the Union. The destiny that
charged him with the task of saving the
Union armed him with the power to de-
stroy slavery, and at his hand slavery

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

met the fatal blow. It is idle to specu-
late upon what he might have done.
The world knows what he did, and it
appears as if foreordained and inevit-
able.

The perspective of half a century af-
fords a view of this great character un-
seen by his contemporaries. Historical
research has revealed and is still reveal-
ing much that was unknown to them.
Cautious and deliberate, but sublimely
confident in himself and inflexible when
resolved, he would brook no interfer-
ence with his purposes. Not that he
would take to himself the glory — noth-
ing is more foreign to his character
than this — but he felt that he could
reach the end in his own way, and he .
was not sure of any other way. The
springs of history, disturbed at their

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

source by ignorant or undiscerning crit-
icism that measured this great man by
its own imperfect standards, will yet run
clear. The conception of Lincoln as
hesitating and reluctant before emanci-
pation would be impossible if he had
launched the Proclamation in 1861 in-
stead of 1862. It is possible only because
he would not be forced by public clamor
to act before the time was ripe. To this
single feature of his conduct, in the last
analysis, must be ascribed the historical
myopia that would regard Lincoln as
willing to save slavery.

They have studied Abraham Lincoln
to little purpose who see in the supreme
act of his life any motive less lofty than
the act itself. To the eye of the devout,
the hand of God was in it and the man
divinely appointed to the work. More

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

than one incident of this unique career
suggests, with almost compelling force,
the direct intervention of an overruling
power. There is much in Lincoln's
character that seems inscrutable. The
occult and mystic temperament, the
prompting voice within him, the dis-
traught moods, the saturating melan-
choly, the recurring dream, the premo-
nitions of violent death, the minor key
in which his whole life was attuned,
relieved only by the unfailing strain of
humor, — these are not idle tales but es-
tablished facts. He avowed that he was
superstitious, but he was incapable of
hypocrisy and made no affectation of re-
ligion. Was there a direct light, supe-
rior to human wisdom, on the path of
this remarkable man ? Hear him speak
for himself: —

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

"That the Almighty does make use
of human agencies and directly inter-
venes in human affairs is one of the
plainest statements of the Bible. I have
had so many evidences of his direction,
so many instances when I have been
controlled by some other power than
my own will, that I cannot doubt that
this power comes from above, I fre-
quently see my way clear to a decision
when lam conscious that I have no suffi-
cient facts upon which to found it • . .
I am satisfied that when the Almighty
wants me to do or not to do a particular
thing, he finds a way of letting me
know it.''

This declaration reflects a peculiar
significance upon the words with which
he laid the Proclamation before his offi-
cial council. "God has decided the
question, in favor of the slaves.''

The psychology of Abraham Lin-
coln, with all his practical and homely

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

traits preeminently a man of the spirit,
is unexplored. It would task philosophy
or science to fathom the depths and
trace the conflicting currents of this
phenomenal character. Yet of all his-
toric personages he least can be under-
stood without looking into his soul. A
man of complete sincerity, the motives
of his life are written there, and there
they must be read. Upon the crime of
human bondage, his soul is an open
book. The faith that directed and sus-
stained him in the mighty task of achiev-
ing for his country the "new birth of
freedom'' is revealed, with Hebraic
grandeur, in that inspired passage of his
last address to the nation: —

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do
we pray, that this mighty scourge of
war may speedily pass away. Yet if

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsman'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, as
was said three thousand years ago so
still it must be said, ^ The judgments of
the Lord are true and righteous alto-
gether.'

J jj

Mystery and portent were over and
about him to the end. On the morning of
his last day, he said to the assembling
cabinet, " Gentlemen, something serious
is about to happen. I have had a strange
dream, and have a presentiment such as
I have had several times before, and al-
ways just before some important event.
. . . But let us proceed to business.''
The business of the day, following upon
the collapse of the rebellion, was to

LINCOLN AND SLAVERY

hasten the return of peace and national
unity. With no word of triumph, but
pardon and reconciliation on his lips, the
travail over, the task accomplished, in
a moment he was snatched from the
summit of his greatness to pure and im-
perishable fame.

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

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