Abraham Lincoln

by William Eleroy Curtis

He believed that Congress had power under the Constitution to regulate all affairs in the Territories and the District of Columbia, and, after consulting with several of the leading citizens of Washington, he introduced a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The first two sections prohibit the introduction of slaves within the limits of the District or the selling of them out of it, exception being made to the servants of officials of the government from the slave-holding States. The third section provides for the apprenticeship and gradual emancipation of children born of slave mothers after January 1, 1850. The fourth provides full compensation for all slaves voluntarily made free by their owners. The fifth recognizes the fugitive-slave law, and the sixth submits the proposition to a popular vote, and provides that it shall not go into force until ratified by a majority of the voters of the District.

This bill met with more violent opposition from other parts of the country than from the slave-holders who were directly affected. The people of the South feared that it might serve as a precedent for similar actions in other parts of the country and stimulate the antislavery sentiment of the North. On the other hand, the abolitionists, with that unreasonable spirit which usually governs men of radical views, condemned the measure as a compromise with wrong, and declared that they would never permit money from the public treasury to be expended for the purchase of human beings. No action was taken in Congress. The bill was referred to the appropriate committee and was stuffed into a pigeonhole, where it was never disturbed; but it is a remarkable coincidence that less than fifteen years later it was Lincoln's privilege to approve an act of Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.

It is interesting to watch the development of Lincoln's views on the slavery question, as revealed by his public utterances and private letters during the great struggle between 1850 and 1860, until the people of the republic named him as umpire to decide the greatest question that ever engaged the moral and intellectual attention of a people. Here and there appear curious phrases, startling predictions, vivid epigrams, and unanswerable arguments. For example, in 1855 he declared that "the autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown and proclaim free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves." A reference to the dates will show that Alexander II., by imperial decree, emancipated the serfs of Russia almost upon the same day, at the same hour, that the Southern States began the greatest war of modern times to protect and extend the institution of slavery.

At Rochester, in the summer of 1859, Mr. Seward furnished the Republican party a watch-cry when he called it "the irrepressible conflict," but two years before and repeatedly after Lincoln uttered the same idea in almost the same phrase. In three Presidential campaigns, in two contests for the Senate, and in almost every local political contest after 1840 slavery was the principal theme of his speeches, until the Douglas debate of 1858 caused him to be recognized as the most powerful advocate and defender of antislavery doctrines.

Senator Douglas found great amusement in accusing Lincoln of a desire to establish social equality between the whites and the blacks, and in his speeches seldom failed to evoke a roar of laughter by declaring that "Abe Lincoln" and other abolitionists "wanted to marry niggers." Lincoln paid no attention to this vulgar joke until he saw that it was becoming serious, and that many people actually believed that the abolitionists were proposing to do what Douglas had said. He attempted to remove this impression by a serious discussion of the doctrine of equality, and in one of his speeches declared, "I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." In another speech he said, "I shall never marry a negress, but I have no objection to any one else doing so. If a white man wants to marry a negro woman, let him do it,—if the negro woman can stand it."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1864

From a photograph in the War Department Collection

At another time he said, "If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. Much more, it I found it in bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of that gentleman alone. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it that no man would question how I ought to decide."

In his Cooper Union speech may be found his strongest argument. "If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality,—its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension,—its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.... Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in the free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care,' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists; reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."