To the rights of stronger races to enslave the blacks, the fathers who framed our government, our national history since, and the age-long fate of Africa unitedly bear witness.
Counter to these three major postulates of Douglas, Lincoln set the following three:—
The enslavement of men is wrong.
The treatment of slavery is a federal concern.
Our history has contained, and still contains a compromise. Our fathers deemed slavery a wrong. But finding it present when they framed our government, and finding its removal impossible at the time, they arranged for its territorial limitation, for its gradual diminishment, and for its ultimate termination.
From these three fundamental postulates in Lincoln's arguments flowed also various corollaries:—
The sinfulness of slavery roots in the elemental manhood of the slave. This manhood warrants his elemental claim to the employment and enjoyment of his life in liberty.
In our form of government, things local and things federal being held within their respective realms respectively supreme, things locally divergent lead to federal compromise.
Certain sections of the country in particular, and the Nation in general being committed, either from policy or from choice, to foster slavery; men who hate the thing as wrong must in patient meekness endure its presence, until in God's own time its presence and its sin and guilt shall be removed.