All of this was within three years of the time when a bill to abolish slavery in Virginia had failed in her General Assembly by only one vote and that vote the casting vote of the speaker.
There is surely no necessity to pile up more authority on this point. If there were it could be done; for not only in New England, but elsewhere in the North, instances can be cited in which violence, and once even murder, occurred. Elijah P. Lovejoy, after having his printing-office sacked three times, fell a martyr to the ferocity of a mob in Illinois for having, under an instinct of humanity, aided a fugitive slave to escape. On one thing, however, the North may with justice pride itself: that in the end, there was awakened in it a general sentiment for emancipation. For this it was indebted to a work of genius produced by a woman; a romance which touched the heart of Christendom. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” overruled the Supreme Court of the United States, and abrogated the Constitution. By arousing the general sentiment of the world against slavery, it contributed more than any other one thing to its abolition in that generation.
But not even then did the North set out to abolish slavery. President Lincoln is universally accredited as the emancipator of the African. It is his hand which is represented in bronze and marble as striking the shackles from the slave. He was the chosen and great standard-bearer of the most advanced element of the North, the great representative of their ideas, the idolized chief magistrate, and the trusted commander of their armies.
His words on this subject must be authoritative.
On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded, he says: “Do the Southern people really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with the slaves or with them about their slaves? ... The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
On the 4th of March, 1861, in his official utterance, his inaugural address, he says: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
If there can possibly be a more authoritative declaration than this, we have it in a resolution passed by Congress of the United States, and signed by Lincoln as President in July, 1861, after the battle of Manassas:
“Resolved ... that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc.
Slave-holding even in Federal territory was not forbidden until June 19, 1862, which was just a month before the bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union should not be returned to their masters [as they had hitherto been under the law], and providing that they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.”
A Constitutional Amendment (the Thirteenth), abolishing and prohibiting evermore the enslavement of human beings, failed to pass in the House of Representatives in the session of 1864, and would have failed altogether had not a member from Ohio changed his vote in order to move a reconsideration and keep it alive till the following session, when Mr. Lincoln having been reëlected, and having recommended its passage, and the war being evidently near its end, it was passed by a vote of 119 yeas to 57 nays.