Abraham Lincoln Quotes
I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death--to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.
Lincoln, Abraham. "Letter to Williamson Durley." 3 Oct. 1845. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, vol. 1, Rutgers University Press, 1953, p. 348.
The Federal Fugitive Slave Act required all in free states to assist owners of escaped slaves to return them to their owners. In 1854 a Missouri slave owner tracked his escaped slave to Wisconsin and the Federal officials incarcerated the slave pending his return. A Wisconsin mob broke the slave out of jail and helped him escape to Canada. Booth was convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act for aiding the escape. Booth’s conviction was overturned by Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Smith whose opinion overturned the Fugitive Slave Act on the grounds that it had usurped state’s rights. The Supreme Court overturned Smith’s ruling, but Booth was pardoned. See {587928}, {587927} & {587928}. State’s rights is a concept that we generally identify with Southern slave holding states to maintain slavery, but in this case, Wisconsin used the concept to fight slavery.
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. Fitzhugh was of the opinion that slavery would be reinstated in the North and his treatise agues for that. More and more intellectual opinion was coming to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished or made universal before Lincoln’s famous statement in his debate against Douglas. Although Northerners and Southerners had come to agree on this point, they disagreed about which alternative would and should prevail.
As an entertainer she had toured much of the world and seen American slavery and that of some other nations. She became a staunch abolitionist and like entertainers in the 20th and 21st centuries she used her celebrity to give anti-slavery lectures and perform for audiences where she donated the proceeds of the event to the abolition cause. She is a particularly interesting political figure in that she seems to be one of the first entertainers to perform for a social cause and become an activist.
While England was strongly opposed to slavery, the English textile industry benefited from importing American Southern cotton. So many in England were supportive of the Confederacy.
Baldwin was a young lawyer at the time. He represented a shipload of ex-slaves who had taken over their Spanish slave ship and landed in America. The Spanish claimed, the ship owners and some of the crew all claimed the “property.”
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.
