Abraham Lincoln Quotes
We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Statement during the Civil War, Quoted in Humanities, September/October 2003
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.
This was Wesley’s last letter. Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, had been a convert to Methodism and was the leading spokesperson in Parliament for making participation in the slave trade illegal. It would take 16 years of effort before England outlawed participation in the slave trade. Note the distinction commonly made by abolitionists at the time regarding American slavery as the worst of all.
Later changed the name to The Emancipator. Many are surprised that a Southern State would have had such strong abolitionist sentiment so early, but East Tennessee was a hotbed of abolition. See {614117} and {614069}
Even before we had a Constitution there was major opposition to slavery. The “price” of the American Union was the acceptance of the slavery of the South. But the hypocrisy of a country based on liberty to allow and enforce slavery was not lost on the founding fathers. Ironically the abolitionists among the founding fathers were certain that they could persuade the Southern slaveholders of the error of slavery in a few years and things would be set right in the land. Even George Washington {630626}, and Thomas Jefferson and some other slaveowners at the time wished to see its abolition. Slaveholding Southern Founding Fathers in general were so wary of the abolitionists that they achieved structural, disproportionate, power in the new Constitution to ward off the abolitionists attempts to reform slavery.
This prophecy written in the later years of Jefferson’s life turned out to be all too true. St. Domingo was an Island in the Caribbean where slavery produced a bloody war. The American Civil War would be far worse.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by the commander in chief as a wartime necessity. Any future President could undo that proclamation. However, the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery forever regardless of the desires of the Congress, Presidents, or State governments.
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.
