Abraham Lincoln is quite clear in his statements about slavery that he believes it is morally wrong.  In the documents, he says so several times, including in the letter to Albert Hodges in 1864 where he writes “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.  I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”  As his speeches during the Lincoln-Douglas debates show, his opposition comes from believing that the Declaration of Independence applies to all men, not just white men.  Lincoln makes it clear that he does not think black men are equal to white men in all ways.  In fact, he expresses quite racist views about blacks during several of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  However, despite his views on race, he clearly maintains that the Declaration of Independence applies to all men.  Speaking about the Dred Scott Decision in 1857 he says: “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men…  They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

However, although Lincoln is quite clear about thinking slavery is morally wrong, his view about what should done with slavery is not quite so clear cut.  Ideally, he would no doubt want slavery abolished entirely, but his statements about slavery show a reluctance to do so.  In many ways, his views remind me of today’s politicians who are personally against abortion, but politically pro-choice.  He personally thinks slavery it is wrong, but he doubts that it is his place to interfere with the rights of Southerners to hold slaves.  In an 1860 letter he makes clear to Alexander Stephens that he would not interfere with slavery in the South and only thinks that its expansion ought to be restricted.

Once the Civil War began, Lincoln’s views on slavery seem to take a back-seat to his desire to reunite the Union.  Although he undoubtedly still believes slavery is wrong, his overriding concern is how to bring the Union back together.  In a letter to Horace Greeley, he writes “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 feeing some and leaving others alone I would also do it.”  At this point, Lincoln is pretty much willing to do anything with slavery as long as it results in reunification of the North and the South.

Ultimately, Lincoln ended up freeing the slaves, but he did not do so simply because of his personal belief that slavery was wrong.  His statements about slavery make it clear that his greatest concern was to reunite the country.  Emancipating the slaves just happened to be part of achieving that goal for Lincoln.

The Lincoln that many people remember is not the man who led the Union in to and through the Civil War. Lincoln, is often been made out to a man of much grater moral standing than men of his day. But when Lincoln’s legacy is examined closer it becomes very apparent that he was a man, flawed like all men. Growing up in the South two different portrayals of Lincoln were taught to me. The first was the common portrayal of Lincoln, that of “Honest Abe,” the great emancipator of slaves and defender the Union. The second portrayal of Lincoln that I was taught was that of a flawed man, as we all are. This portrayal credits Lincoln for his accomplishments, but also recognizes that he made mistakes, and was a man of his day. I agree with Courtney’s statement in her blog post, “Thoughts about Thoughts,” where she said “Confederate memorial groups who criticize the modern idealization and glorification of Lincoln might actually be on to something.” I am not saying that the Confederate memorial groups have it all right, but I do believe that there is merit in approaching Lincoln as a man of his day. Only by examining the man Lincoln can we determine his true feelings about race and the institution of slavery.

Lincoln was a man of his day; his views closely mirrored those of other Republicans and Northerners. I believe to approach issue of slavery in this way we must first decipher Lincoln’s view of blacks. Lincoln’s feelings about race are most clear in his earliest writings and speeches. Lincoln, like many northerners of the day, did not feel that whites and blacks should be considered as equals. In Ottawa, Illinois in August 1859 Lincoln stated, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” To Lincoln blacks were blacks and whites were whites and it should stay that way. In this same speech Lincoln conceded to Douglas that blacks were inferior in many ways including: “color, … [or] in moral or intellectual endowment.” Where Lincoln disagreed with Douglas, and many Southerners, was that blacks were people with “[the] right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns.”

It is essential to remember that Lincoln did not view blacks as equal nor did he believe they should be eligible to participate fully in society. Stating in a speech in Charleston, Illinois: “I am not… in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” Lincoln goes on to say: “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.”

What do these statements tell us about Lincoln’s views on race in the years leading up to his presidency? I argue that they clearly show that Lincoln was not that different from southerners like Douglas. By today’s standards, Lincoln was a racist; at the time his views on race were the norm. Lincoln clearly did not have a moral problem with blacks being in an inferior position to whites. In fact he was a proponent of this. Where Lincoln differed from his opponents was in his belief that blacks were men, and as men they should be allowed to work, earn, and be free. Lincoln’s view of the position of blacks in society resembles the caste system in India, where there was a dominant ruling class, and a lower class barred from receiving privileges of the ruling class.

So how does Lincoln’s views on race affect his views about slavery? In all of the provided works never did Lincoln support the morality of slavery. Though he never calls for the immediate emancipation of slaves in the provided documents, until the issuance of the emancipation proclamation in 1863. Even in his Speech to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln calls for the gradual emancipation of slaves and compensation of slave owners and slave states. Though Lincoln does believe that “All slaves who shall have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of the war [shall remain free].” These documents do not portray Lincoln as the man we remember today, who fought vigorously for the emancipation of slaves. Even in 1860 when he was elected, Lincoln writes to his friend Alexander Stephens discussing how slavery “ought to be restricted.”

Lincoln mentions multiple times how it would be unconstitutional to abolish slavery, he only acquiesces as a means to preserve the Union and end the war. In a letter written in 1864, to Albert Hodges, Lincoln defends his actions regarding the emancipation of slaves as unconstitutional, but justifies it as a military necessity. Lincoln sites when he censured Gen. Fremont and Hunter’s separate attempts to emancipate slaves as lacking the “indispensable necessity” to warrant these unconstitutional acts. Lincoln makes certain to justify his later act to emancipate the nations slaves stating: “I felt that measures, otherwise 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. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.”

I would argue that Lincoln did not emancipate the nations slaves because of a higher moral call, but as a military strategy to end the civil war and preserve the constitution. Lincoln acted to defend the nation, not to defend the slaves’ rights. Lincoln’s views on race allowed him to justify the existence of slavery as a morally wrong, yet constitutional institution. Lincoln’s duty to the preservation of the constitution allowed, him to justify the existence of slavery. Through Lincoln’s views of race and actions he took we can infer that he would have been fine with either the continued existence and containment of slavery, or the gradual emancipation of slaves over time. I wonder if the Union had not been in peril, would Lincoln have immediately emancipated the slaves? Also I wonder that if Lincoln was willing to take an action that he viewed as unconstitutional, to save the Union, what other unconstitutional acts did he take during the war? Lastly I would like to know the effects Lincoln’s views of the two separate race groups had in the years following his death and the reconstruction of the nation?

In the modern conscience, race and slavery are almost guaranteed to occupy the same ignominy in the remembrance of the Southern slave economy. American students in the South, myself included, were taught that Abraham Lincoln was the superhuman hero that was adamantly against slavery and advocated equality – an idol to be worshipped. The documents in this week’s reading packet, however, provide a much more nuanced description of his views on slavery.  They show that while Lincoln eventually regarded emancipation as necessary, before the war he had no plans to alter Southern slaveholding traditions and expressed some flagrantly racist views.

Although he expressed the view that slavery is intrinsically wrong, he was opposed to racial equality.  Because I am not one to smear “The Great Emancipator’s” name, I believe his views of racial equality stem from the prevailing popular opinion which had begun to marginalize abolitionists by the 1850s. To be sure, Lincoln provided ample evidence for his opposition to the institution of slavery. He writes in Peoria Illinois in 1854 that “I can not but hate [slavery]. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world”.  Throughout the excerpts, Lincoln returns to the Declaration of Independence and bases his case against slavery on the clause that all men are created equal “in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (my italics)  He writes in a debate in Ottawa, Ill. (Aug. 1858) “there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence”.  In this way, he is not portrayed as an abolitionist but as a governmental purist.  Although he states that slaves are allowed the right of liberty, he shies away from abolition until late 1862. Before the war, he reiterates the Republican plank in Alton, IL by saying that the only way to combat slavery is to prevent its spread not to attack the institution where it is already established. (Doc 3) He even reiterates this on the eve of secession to Alexander Stephens (Georgia Senator) by saying that he has no plans on abolishing slavery.

For today’s standards, Mr. Lincoln appears staunchly conservative in his debates with Stephen Douglas with regards to race equality. While he acknowledges the slaves’ right to freedom in the territories, he does not call for basic civil rights even in free states such as Illinois. His response to the Dred Scott decision in 1857 includes this strict reading of the Declaration of Independence: “but [the Founding Fathers] did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” He also claims in his debates that there are fundamental physiological differences between the races that will prevent them from “living together on terms of social and political equality”. (Charleston, IL, 1858)  This logic then leads him to a very conservative (and shocking) claim in a Charleston, Ill. debate (1858), where he writes that “I tell [Stephen Douglas] very frankly that I am not in favor of Negro citizenship.”

I discounted these senatorial debate sentiments at first as pandering to a predominantly white pioneer crowd. However, Lincoln’s actions during the war as President support a disregard for ex-slaves equality with whites. Just before the drafting of the emancipation proclamation, he had written that “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.” (letter to Horace Greely, Aug 22 1862). Lincoln was a pragmatist during the war, and emancipation would only happen if it aided the war effort. In particular he defends the Emancipation Proclamation as a necessity for the survival of the Union, not a result of personal abolitionist tendencies. He writes to a Kentuckian friend, Albert Hodges, (April 4 1864), saying that “I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery”. Rather it was in the interest of the Union armies to gain 130,000 troops and laborers by the act.

To Lincoln, freedom and race equality were two very different non-linked outcomes. Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery because it made America’s founding documents hypocritical. For a nation based upon equality of all men to pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, slavery was an affront to the conscience. Despite this appeal to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, during the war he justifies emancipation as a necessity of war. Furthermore, Lincoln was decidedly not in favor of black-white equality. The interplay between freedom and equality is perfectly summed up in Lincoln’s response to the Dred Scott decision. He writes that “[Judge Douglas concludes that] because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.” While he would not see them enslaved, they could exist as a separate and free class of second-hand citizens.  This leads me to ask: Was Lincoln the first to advocate Jim Crow laws?

To the modern American schoolchild learning the history of her country, fuzzy ideas of the Civil War might be transmitted, pitting a villainous, or at least severely misguided, South, where every white man was a spoiled plantation owner or an evil overseer, against a North full of heroes who realized black people were just like them. The leader of these heroes was Abraham Lincoln, a true forward-thinker who would be among the most tolerant Americans even today, and who cut the bondage of every American slave, warmly inviting them into American society as equals. Yet analysis into Lincoln’s less iconic speeches and writings reveal that he was subject to many of the same prejudices as the vast majority of Americans at the time, and that the emancipation strategy he most favored was sending them elsewhere once freed. In light of this, those Confederate memorial groups who criticize the modern idealization and glorification of Lincoln might actually be on to something.

Reading some of Lincoln’s statements on race would certainly burst the bubble of someone who had imagined the great American hero of liberty and equality as the very paragon of tolerance. But after all, we must realize that Lincoln was a product of his times. He was not an anachronism, no space alien beamed down to show Americans the error of their ways. Could such a person ever be elected to the presidency, after all? He was human, and subject to the same sicknesses of society, a judgment of others based on the color of their skin, as nearly everyone else at the time. Yet Lincoln did have certain ideas which, while finding support in the Republican party, were passionately controversial and the antithesis of those of many of his countrymen.

Not before the war, and perhaps never throughout it, did Lincoln believe that black people were quite the same as white people. He believed they had inherent differences, the most manifest and inalienable being physical. “There is a physical difference between the two [races],” Lincoln claimed in 1858, “which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” In 1862, when talking to a delegation of freedmen to persuade them to colonize in Central America, one of his arguments was that the “similarity of climate with [their] native land” was “suited to [their] physical condition.”

Some Southerners may have used such arguments to portray blacks as being ideal for their work as slaves. Yet Lincoln believed that their physical difference was due to the climate in which their race had long lived, and suggested that it was unjust for them to be in North America at all. He certainly did not believe that this physical difference occasioned them to be slaves. “In some respects [a black woman] certainly is not my equal,” he said in 1857, “but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”

Lincoln’s discourse suggests he found black people different from whites in other ways, as well. In 1858, he claimed that a black man “is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.” Note, however, that he does not commit to a black man not being his equal in the latter qualities, only suggests that this might be the case. I find this very interesting, as in this statement he only admits to the difference in color, which is obvious, and what meaning has color, after all? At any rate, this statement seems a way of hedging, that is, pleasing everyone by suggesting the superiority of the white race in these faculties but not committing to an opinion. His actual opinions at the time are difficult to discern.

At any rate, at the 1862 meeting with a black delegation mentioned above, Lincoln admits that black men can be as intelligent as their white counterparts. “It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men,” he states, “and not those who have been systematically oppressed.” He acknowledges that for those in bondage, their “intellects are clouded by Slavery.”

Thus it seems Lincoln was very stable in his claim of a physical difference between whites and blacks, but not so certain about whether they differed in moral and intellectual capacity. He recognized that slavery had dehumanizing effects on those subject to it, leading to an appearance that black people had less mental faculty and were morally inferior. Yet he saw that indeed this was only an appearance, as his comments to the freedmen suggest. This may, of course, be Lincoln’s strategy of trying to please everyone, that they may work together as harmoniously as possible, simply giving lip service to the black community. However, I do not think so. Lincoln was an intelligent and sensible man, and when interacting with free black men, I do not think he would have allowed prior assumptions to prevent him from realizing their intelligence. What’s more, I doubt he would have invited this delegation into the White House if he did not respect them.

Lincoln’s ultimate opinions on slavery and race are difficult to pinpoint with certainty. But I would say these things with confidence: He thought that black and white people were at least physically different, that it was unnatural to bring Africans over as slaves in the first place, and that both whites and blacks would be better off if the blacks were colonized back into Africa or a similar climate. He thought that the institution of slavery was wrong, as it dehumanized those in bondage; besides, he wished, as he wrote in 1862, “that all men every where could be free.” However, before the war and well into it, he did not think it was sensible, nor did he believe he had the right, to impose his morals on the nation and effect immediate emancipation. Saving the Union was always his main aim, and as the war progressed, immediate emancipation became a strategy used in desperation, even bypassing the Constitution, so that the nation which gave meaning to that Constitution might live.

I also want to note that it is important to remember how much opinions can change over time, especially when faced with a traumatic experience like war. From my own experience in daily life, I have noticed that opinions naturally change over the course of time, even from day to day, depending on moods and social factors including the persuasion of others. They can seem to change depending on who we are talking to; the degree to which these are instances of trying to placate our audience, or evidence of our less solid opinions being swayed by others, differs in each case. With this in mind, trying to arrive at Lincoln’s innate and ultimate opinions on slavery should be attempted with care. At any rate, Lincoln’s opinions were not some constant, innate secret that we can someday uncover and unlock like buried treasure. The best we can do is define what he articulated in his discourse, that is, his speeches and writings both public and private, which were probably his best way of holding his own thoughts together against the onslaught of opinions and complaints that battered him in his role as president. And we must bear in mind that these opinions were bound to change over time, so blanket statements such as “Lincoln thought blacks were intellectually inferior,” won’t do if we find contradicting evidence elsewhere in time.