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VIII

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SLAVES

ABRAHAM LINCOLN's hatred of slavery was inborn, but its development began when he saw human beings sold at auction on the levee at New Orleans and chained and beaten upon the decks of Mississippi River steamboats on their way to market. These horrors were first witnessed by him when he made his voyage on the flatboat from Gentryville, and the impression was deepened upon his second journey four years later from New Salem. Even to the day of his death the recollection was vivid. He alluded to it frequently while the slave problem was perplexing him and his advisers during the war, and the picture was before his eyes when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. As one of his companions said, "Slavery ran the iron into him then and there."

However, the mind of the boy had been prepared for this impression by the teachings of his mother. In 1804 a crusade against slavery in Kentucky was started by the itinerant preachers of the Baptist Church, and the Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, was a bold abolitionist and boldly proclaimed the doctrine of human liberty wherever he went. Lincoln's father and mother were among his most devoted disciples, and when he was a mere child Abraham Lincoln inherited their hatred of human servitude. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he once said in a speech. "I cannot remember when I did not think so and feel so."

Down in a corner of Indiana where the Lincolns lived there were slaves for years after the admission of the State to the Union, in spite of the ordinance of 1787

and the statutes which Lincoln read in his youth. Nor was the fact a secret. The census of 1820 showed one hundred and ninety slaves, but during the next year the State Supreme Court declared them free.

In the following year (1822) occurred a great moral revolution on the frontier. Then commenced the struggle between the friends and opponents of slavery which lasted until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Abraham Lincoln, with the preparation I have described, was from the beginning an active participant, and gradually became a leader in one of the greatest controversies that has ever engaged the intellectual and moral forces of the world.

In 1822, eight years before the Lincoln family left Indiana, an attempt was made to introduce slavery into Illinois, and was defeated by Edward Coles, of Virginia, the Governor, who gave his entire salary for four years to pay the expense of the contest. The antislavery members of the Legislature contributed a thousand dollars to the fund, which was spent in the distribution of literature on the subject. For a time the storm subsided, but the deep hatred of the iniquity was spreading through the North, and abolition societies were being organized in every city and village where the friends of human freedom existed in sufficient numbers to sustain themselves against the powerful proslavery sentiment. Occasionally there was a public discussion, but the controversy raged most fiercely at the corner groceries, at the county court-house, and at other places where thinking men were in the habit of assembling, and Lincoln was always ready and eager to enter the debates. His convictions were formed and grew firmer as he studied the question, and his moral courage developed with them. It was a good deal of an ordeal for an ambitious young man just beginning his career to attack a popular institution, in the midst of a community many of whom had been born and educated in slave States and con

the treaty with Mexico at the close of the war of 1848, which added to the United States a territory as large as half of Europe. The slave-holders immediately demanded it for their own, but in the previous Congress the Whig and antislavery Democrats had succeeded in attaching to an appropriation bill an amendment known as the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited the extension of slavery into the territory recently acquired. This had been followed up by the adoption of similar provisions wherever the Whigs could get an opportunity to attach them to other legislation. Lincoln used to say that during his two years in Congress he voted for the Wilmot Proviso in one form or another more than fifty times.

Upon his arrival in Washington his horror of the slavery system and the impressions received during his voyages to New Orleans were revived by witnessing the proceedings and the distress in the slave-markets of the national capital, and he determined to devote his best efforts to a removal of that scandal and reproach. Fifteen years later, in one of his speeches during the debate with Douglas, he described the slave-shambles of Washington, and said, "In view from the windows of the Capitol a sort of negro livery stable where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses, has been openly maintained for more than fifty years."

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

sidered what he believed a curse to be a divine institution. Nevertheless, the sense of justice and humanity stimulated Abraham Lincoln to take his place upon the side of freedom, and he never lost an opportunity to denounce slavery as founded on injustice and wrong.

His first opportunity to make a public avowal of his views occurred in 1838, when the Illinois Legislature passed a series of resolutions declaring that the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding States by the Federal Constitution, and "that we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies and of the doctrines promulgated by them." Lincoln and five other members of the Legislature voted against these resolutions; and in order to make his position more fully understood by his constituents and the members of the Whig party throughout the State, he prepared a protest, which he persuaded Dan Stone, one of his colleagues from Sangamon County, to sign with him, and, at their request, it was spread upon the journal of the House, as follows:

"Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.

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'They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercised, unless at the request of the people of the District.

"The difference between these opinions and those

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