Abraham Lincoln Quotes
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
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He is often referred to as “of Lahore.” He was a much better theologian than a historian. His credit of Islam with the principles that would end slavery, ignored the fact that just as American founding fathers espoused equality and freedom yet some owned slaves, likewise Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was a slaveholder. Historically, long after most of the world had abolished slavery, it still existed in the Islamic nations. They were forced out of the African slave trade by the European powers in the 19th century. But slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia as late as the 1960s. Slavery was still practiced in Sudan in 2005 with Muslims attacking Christians and Animists and taking them as slaves despite the official laws banning such practices. The government itself aided the slavers. Also, although Islam is credited with a major assault on slavery, it was not slavery per se that Muhammad banned. It was the slavery of another Muslim. Sharia and the Koran allows slavery so long as the slave is an unbeliever.
Although English, Cobett spent time in America and published a newspaper, The Porcupine Gazette, in Philadelphia. We was very conservative but on the issue of slavery his resembled a liberal point of view. He never used sugar, coffee, or rum because slave labor produced them. However, he advocated legally enslaving lazy people, blacks and whites, who would not work.
Even before we had a Constitution there was major opposition to slavery. The “price” of the American Union was the acceptance of the slavery of the South. But the hypocrisy of a country based on liberty to allow and enforce slavery was not lost on the founding fathers. Ironically the abolitionists among the founding fathers were certain that they could persuade the Southern slaveholders of the error of slavery in a few years and things would be set right in the land. Even George Washington {630626}, and Thomas Jefferson and some other slaveowners at the time wished to see its abolition. Slaveholding Southern Founding Fathers in general were so wary of the abolitionists that they achieved structural, disproportionate, power in the new Constitution to ward off the abolitionists attempts to reform slavery.
Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
