Abraham Lincoln Quotes


I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.


Citations

Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Speech, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 17, 1859

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

Jefferson was then the United States Minister to France. While in Paris he was offered membership by M. de Warville in the Society for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade. Jefferson felt that he had to decline because his joining would have been seen as a politically polarizing act, inappropriate for an Ambassador of the American government which was divided on the issue of slavery. Some criticize the refusal and argue that this would have been the perfect act to push the abolition perspective, and question Jefferson’s sincerity about slavery as he not only refused to join the society, but never freed his own slaves though it is argued that he never made enough money to afford to emancipate them.


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.”


The general issued a military order emancipating slaves in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order feeling it was too premature and it would cause the slave states that stayed in the Union--Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky--to go over to the Confederates.


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.


Brown was the richest man in Rhode Island and made much of his money in the slave trade. This quotation shows that slavery was not completely a North verses South split. Northerners like Brown for whose family Brown University was named, was as virulent supporter of slavery as the most ardent Southerner.


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.


Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
  • Born: February 12, 1809
  • Died: April 15, 1865
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: President

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.