Abraham Lincoln Quotes

While Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, at the time the Civil War was not going well for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation caused the South great distress in terms of practicality and their morale. The slaves if they escaped could come to a Union State and would be forever free. The South would lose labor that they could ill afford to lose as well as they were forced to devote more white manpower to keeping the slaves in bondage. While most people think the Proclamation freed all the slaves, it did not; it only freed slaves in the rebellious Southern states. Border states such as Maryland, not in rebellion, could keep their slaves legally and did until they were freed later.

Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.

Note that Lincoln did not justify the emancipation proclamation on moral or humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds of military necessity.

Essentially, the case of moral hazard was made against paying the slave owners. Lincoln took a pragmatic approach. However, not only was Northern opposition too strong for this proposal, but the Southern slave holders would never agree to selling their slaves. What Lincoln and most “pragmatic” Northerners did not realize is that even if the slave owners would get a fair market price for the slaves, they would be left with land and no way to work it. Their families would have no servants. They might have to work themselves like Northern farmers did, and their entire standard and style of living would be destroyed. Their sons were not well educated as many Northern young men were and were brought up to be gentlemen, politicians, and occasional soldiers—not work with their hands. They could not compete. And the slaveholders were right as the whole history of Reconstruction and backwardness demonstrated for more than 100 years.

This Civil War recruiting poster was described by the Free Library of Philadelphia as “Civil War recruitment print targeting African Americans by evoking the freedoms granted by the Emancipation Proclamation. Depicts a montage of symbolic scenes centered around an African American Union soldier triumphantly holding up a sword and an American flag with the banner "Freedom to the Slave." He stands near broken shackles upon a tri-color flag adorned with a coiled snake. The flag is tugged upon by one of three joyous slaves freed by an African American soldier. Other scenes depict an African American man reading a newspaper on a rocking chair near a plow and child, African American children entering a "Public School" near a church, and a regiment of "U.S. Colored Troops" marching across a battlefield strewn with dead bodies.”

Lincoln had promised amnesty to Southerners who would pledge loyalty to the Union. What many feared was that this would include slave owners re-enslaving their former "property," or that the government would allow them to do so in order to stop the rebellion.

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.

See Mark {606304}; also Matthew {606727}. Lincoln had used the “house divided” biblical metaphor in 1843 when arguing for Whig solidarity. The first political use of the Biblical metaphor and quotation with respect to American slavery appears to have been by Sam Houston in 1850 {603970}. The first use with respect to American slavery was byMassachusetts abolitionist, Edmund Quincy, in 1852. The second sentence of this famous quotation was forsaged earlier. See Lincoln, {619494} & {584918}. Also See Felix Rohatyn who used the Lincoln line to refer to poverty: {70611}.

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.

The cause of the Civil War was slavery. When the Souh fired on the nation’s army and governmental personal, the secession became treason. So Slavery was the cause of the treason. Douglass argued that if we eliminate slavery, we eliminate the cause of the Treason.