Abraham Lincoln Quotes
I say now, however, as I have all the while said, that on the territorial question - that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices, - I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.
Lincoln, Abraham. "Letter to William H. Seward." Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, vol. 4, Rutgers University Press, 1953, p. 183.
See {613416} for the clause that the Southerners found so offensive.
The problem was that Congress was gridlocked on the slavery issue. The Southern states had more than their proportional share of Congressional power with slave populations being counted as 3/5 of a person for seats in the House of Representatives and parity with the other states in the Senate. The South could not stop all the attempts to debate slavery and the abolitionists attempts to end it, but they could block all legislation that might curtain slavery. As the United States was getting more sophisticated and educated hostility toward slavery was steadily increasing. The economies of the non Southern states was growing faster and more assuredly than the slave economies of the South. Abolition was all but inevitable but it would still take more time. Note that the President totally deferred to Congress on the leadership of what the policy should be. Presidents at that time were far less influential in making national policy and national legislating than they have become. Many think that the balance has shifted too far towards the Executive Branch.
Providence, a large shipping center, not only shipped Southern Cotton, but was the home port of some of the major slave traders who brought and sold slaves to the South.
While this assessment was true up until the 1980s. By the 21st century there were almost no serious historians who thought that the motivation of the Confederate States for the Civil War was anything but slavery and the economic impact that abolition might bring. However, one of your advantages having this collection of historical quotations is that you can see for yourself why the Southern states say they were seceding. This following are four of the official secession resolution documents. Read these and you will see that all the claims that there were other major reasons for secession are just attempts to make the Confederacy a little less brutal and greedy. See {621371}, {619793}, {621372}, {621375}
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.
He was shocked at the public reaction when he received more hate mail than at any other act of his career.
After Adams’ term as President, he was elected to the House of Representatives where he served for the rest of his career. He was constantly calling for the emancipation of slaves (see {77463}) in the House debates. The Southern Congressmen were so offended by this that they got the majority of the House to pass a rule that made using the word “slavery” out of order. It was called the “Gag Rule”. Adams, one of the best legislators and lawyers of his day, then started reading in the House debates petitions of his constituents calling for an end to slavery. The Southerners called for the Speaker to declare him out of order for violating the gag rule. But Adams pointed out that the Constitution gave citizens the right to petition Congress with no controls on the petitions. Therefore the reading of the petitions was Constitutionally mandated and trumped the Rules of the House. He then arranged to have many petitions submitted which he dutifully read on the House floor to the extreme anger of the Southerners.
Seward, the newly appointed Secretary of State was extremely concerned that if the radical direction that many of the Southern States were moving in turned into a Civil War, that the Union should not be seen as the precipitating initiator. His policy was followed and the secessionist extremists, not so politically sensitive, attacked Fort Sumter and became the initiator of the war so far as public opinion was concerned domestically and internationally. It was very important for the Union effort that the Confederates by seen as a group of radicals rebelling against the authority of a legitimate state. If that was the case, any effort to aid or help the South could be seen as an unfriendly act of war against the United States. Conversely, the South would have liked to be seen as an independent nation, no longer connected to the United States and entitled to diplomatic relations and foreign trade with all other nations. But the attack on Fort Sumter made that position much harder to maintain.
Buchanan us considered by most historians to have been the worst or one of the worst Presidents of the United States. At this point, he was a lame duck president with Abraham Lincoln, the President Elect soon to take office. This speech, just encouraged the South more than ever and helped to bring about the Civil War. His vacillation and lack of any leadership on the slavery question exacerbated the polarization that was tearing the nation apart.
This was not an original notion with Abraham Lincoln. Seward and most of the “Radical Republicans” believed that the slavery issue had to be resolved and attempts to compromise were futile.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
The reason for secession was the threat to slavery, which was a great threat to the slave-owners of the South. However, the non slave-owners had a very strong vested interest in maintaining slavery in that most Southerners had been brought up with such a negative view of Blacks that they were paranoid of Black equality or even worse some Blacks in positions of authority over whites. At the time, it was the Republican Party that was the advocate for minority equality and the Democratic Party embraced the racists. The parties would flip flop after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending legal segregation was passed by a Democratic President and a Democratic Majority Congress.
And so they were. However, Calhoun had already concluded which alternatives the South would take. See {635930}
His fear was well founded. That is exactly what the British tried to do.
It was in fact, the following year when the South rebelled to prevent a “settlement”, but the irony was that the Civil War brought the settlement—emancipation-- faster and on less favorable terms than had they not rebelled and let the political process end slavery gradually as the majority of the nation wanted and morality dictated.
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.
