Abraham Lincoln Quotes
I most cordially sympathize with your Excellency in the wish to preserve the peace of my own native state, Kentucky; but it is with regret I search, and cannot find, in your not very short letter, any declaration or intimation that you entertain any desire for the preservation of the Union.
Kentucky and Maryland were so called “border states” between the North and the South. Many citizens of both were sympathetic to the South on the slavery issue but did not want war. The governor of Kentucky had written Lincoln saying that Kentucky did not wish to secede and join the South, and wanted to avoid war or any fighting in Kentucky. In addition to his general desire for peace, Kentucky itself was split down the middle and that state could have its own civil war with half the population fighting the other half. Lincoln had to deal with the situation very delicately. It was not enough however that Kentucky did not secede and join the rebellion and Southern Confederacy. Lincoln wanted a commitment to help preserve the Union. What Kentucky and Maryland got, that most people do not realize is that they were exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation—only the slaves of the states in rebellion had their slaves emancipated. Later Congress included the border states ending slavery.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Letter to the Governor of Kentucky, September 1861
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The Governor was a staunch Confederate supporter but his state legislature majority favored the Union. He was forced out of the governorship when the 1861 election gave the legislature a veto-proof pro Union majority.
Bragg and other Southerner leaders had an unusual concept of equality. Ever since the original Constitution, Northerner’s votes counted for themselves only while a single Southerner’s vote counted for all his slaves as well. So the individual Southerner always had more political power than his Northern counterpart. However, this notion of equality reached it’s acme when it came to the new territories. The Southern argument was that Southerners could not equally prosper in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska if they could not bring their slaves to work the land. The thought that Southerners were equally able to personally work the new lands or pay labor seems to never have occurred to them. If Northerners could prosper that way then Southerners should be equally able to do so also. However, many Southern whites simply could not conceive of a “gentleman” working in the fields. Therefore they would not be equally able to prosper in the new territories.
It would be almost 30 years until Jackson would have been proved correct and the Civil War had begun.
The Baptist Churches of America were split asunder by the slavery issue. Wayland, who represented both the Northern abolitionist-leaning Baptist Churches and the Southern pro slavery churches, tried to forge a middle ground whereby slavery would end by the moral enlightenment of man and his love for fellow man as opposed to by legislation or economic pressure. He successfully predicted the outcome of the conflict except for one error he made. The conflict DID end slavery. The Baptist Church finally split into southern and northern wings in 1845. To this day, the Southern Church is extremely conservative, and fundamentalist; the Northern, very liberal and modern.
Some Lincoln critics point to this quotation to illustrate their belief that Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves was not based on deeply held personal moral convictions but was the result of pragmatic political forces pure and simple. Others believe that this statement to Greeley represented a political tactic to hold Maryland and Kentucky—then slave states—in the Union, but that Lincoln was waiting for the right time to adopt a policy of making emancipation paramount.
Abraham Lincoln’s major political opponent in Illinois agreed with Lincoln on the criticality of preserving the Union from a split off of the Southern States. He tended to be more willing to pander to the South than Lincoln, however they were strong allies on the fundamental issue. However, what the slavery forces in the south wanted and needed to forever protect slavery was not in the power of any President to do, short of ending the democracy. Slavery was doomed in the long run if there was no way to enforce the Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott decision upon (Northern) states whose constitutions and laws made any slave who entered the state free and whose people would not use its police and legal powers to return runaway slaves. It was the abolitionists who won the majority in the battle of public opinion on slavery. It was only a matter of time when slavery would become untenable in the South. Lincoln was unwilling to force the Northern states to return fugitive slaves against the constitution, laws and will of the people of those states as Buchanan said he was (but had a hard time doing). Also Lincoln was unwilling to allow new territories to enter the union if they allowed slavery.
The American Civil War was followed by intellectuals throughout the world. Most were offended by the immorality of the slavery that the South was fighting to maintain, but admired the way they organized and fought for their principles.
Committee of the Congress. This was the prevailing Congressional and public view except for the South which had coalesced around an intellectual rationalization. See {618013}.
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.
