Abraham Lincoln Quotes
You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional -- I think differently. But the proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it cannot be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Letter to James Conkling, August 26, 1863
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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.
The Union troops had just been routed at Bull Run. Many in the North thought that the war would be a short one with little disruption of loss of life. Here Norton, like so many others, provided a a more realistic assessment. Also note the reference to “barbarism” in the South, When the Union was formed, the Southern states were not as well developed as the North from an industrial, educational or cultural perspective. There were vestiges of aristocracy, crude law enforcement, and much more poverty (Virginia excepted) than in the North. Most Northerners thought that the South would reform—modernize and become more like the North, but instead the gulf became greater as the North itself developed and changed rapidly while the South was mired in its traditions with their aristocracy gaining more political, economic and cultural control. This attitude of Northern superiority, objectively valid though it may have been, was sorely resented by the South and this resentment has persisted into relatively modern times.
Lincoln was then a Whig campaigning for his party.
First Irish Bishop in the United States. American Catholic bishops were divided during the Civil War over the slavery question. For a bishop’s view opposing slavery, see Purcell {612351}.
The political machine of New York City, unlike most others in the Northeast were supporters of the Southern position on slavery. They had strong economic relations with the Southern planters and wanted to keep the federal government far away from state and local affairs.
In June of 1850, a bipartisan group of Southern politicians met in Nashville, TN for the purpose of organizing strategy and tactics to ward off and defeat the growing aggressiveness of Northern politicians and other leaders in trying to abolish slavery. They issued an address to the people. This is one of the clearest statements of the position of most of the Southern Politicians on the increased efforts to abolish or curtail slavery. They felt that a deal had been made by the founding fathers and the first Congress not to deal with the slavery issue, and that deal must be honored in perpetuity. Most Northerners agreed that a deal had been made, but it was not binding forever—that a Congress could not limit the scope of a future Congress except via a Constitutional Amendment. The deal on Slavery was a deal not to address it for a while. It was not a deal to accept the Southern point of view. And none of it was written into the Constitution because opinion was even then split and a majority could not be mustered for a compromise that would write legal slavery into the Constitution. But many Southerners believed that its absence implied that it could not be addressed by the government. They demanded the right of their states to choose slavery if they so wished. Time was not on the side of the South and the Southerners who insisted on State’s Rights regarding slavery opposed States Rights for Northern States who wished to disallow fugitive slaves to be returned to owners. The more fugitive slaves there were, the more hypocritical the Southern position became as they needed Federal preemption on the issue of Fugitive Slaves, else slavery would end by escape and non-return of slaves.
President Andrew Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives and was being tried in by the Senate. A majority of the Senators voted for conviction but the vote was 1 short of the two-thirds that were needed. Johnson remained in office.
What makes this quotation so historically interesting is that the abiding by the Supreme Court’s decisions on constitutionality was even an issue. It was because of the terrible Dred Scott decision which required Northern States to return fugitive slaves to their owners despite the constitutions of those states which stated that all men were free. A substantial part of the Democratic Party was the “solid South” and the return of fugitive slaves was one of the major issues of the 1860 Presidential Election. Ironically, the Southern States were arguing AGAINST states’ rights when the Northern States’ laws and Constitutions made fugitive slaves free the minute they set foot in the state.
In the early days of the Civil War slaves who escaped and reached the Northern lines were routinely returned to their Southern owners as the Fugitive Slave Act required. The first actual emancipation of the Civil war was not the President’s proclamation but was Butler who as a Union General ordered that the slaves escaping from Virginia no longer be returned. He was accused of violating the then existing law, however he had a legal rationale which hoisted Virginia on its own petard.
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.”
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.
