Given the “differences” between the two races and the hostile attitudes of white people towards Black people, Lincoln argued, it would be “better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed Black men and women at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Lincoln first publicly advocated for colonization in 1852, and in 1854 said that his first instinct would be “to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia” (the African state founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821). His two great political heroes, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization both were enslavers who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that Black and white people could live together peaceably. Lincoln thought colonization could resolve the issue of slavery.įor much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization-or the idea that a majority of the African American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America-was the best way to confront the problem of slavery. In the last speech of his life, delivered on April 11, 1865, he argued for limited Black suffrage, saying that any Black man who had served the Union during the Civil War should have the right to vote. Like his views on emancipation, Lincoln’s position on social and political equality for African Americans would evolve over the course of his presidency. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust. What he did believe was that, like all men, Black men had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. President Abraham Lincoln with African Americans outside of the White House, circa 1863. Only with emancipation, and with his support of the eventual 13th Amendment, would Lincoln finally win over the most committed abolitionists. Though Lincoln saw himself as working alongside the abolitionists on behalf of a common anti-slavery cause, he did not count himself among them. Leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell,” and went so far as to burn a copy at a Massachusetts rally in 1854. They didn’t care about working within the existing political system, or under the Constitution, which they saw as unjustly protecting slavery and enslavers. In a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854, Lincoln presented more clearly than ever his moral, legal and economic opposition to slavery-and then admitted he didn’t know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system.Ībolitionists, by contrast, knew exactly what should be done about it: Slavery should be immediately abolished, and freed enslaved people should be incorporated as equal members of society. The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did not explicitly write the word “slavery” in the Constitution, but they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count enslaved people for the purposes of representation in the federal government. Abraham Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution.
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