Lincoln’s Evolution (1861-1862)
May 7, 1861
“We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. There may be one consideration used in stay of such final judgement, but that is not for us to use in advance. That is, that there exists in our case, an instance of a vast and far reaching disturbing element, which the history of no other free nation will probably ever present. That however is not for us to say at present. Taking the government as we found it we will see if the majority can preserve it.”
–Lincoln quoted in John Hay diary, May 7, 1861
July 20, 1862
“The President himself has been, out of pure devotion to what he considers the best interests of humanity, the bulwark of the institution he abhors, for a year. But he will not conserve slavery much longer. When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound. Even now he speaks more boldly and sternly to slaveholders than to the world. If I have sometimes been impatient of his delay I am so no longer.”
–John Hay (age 23) to Mary Jay (age 16), Sunday, July 20, 1862 (Gilder Lehrman Collection GLC01569)
August 22, 1862
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
–Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, released first in the Washington National Intelligencer on August 23
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
Prince Rivers (House Divided Project)
Debating Freedom Dates
- August 1st
- January 1st
- February 1st
- June 19th
- December 18th
Women’s Loyal National League (1864)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Lincoln’s Lobbying (January 1865)
Thirteenth Amendment (JAN 1865 / DEC 1865)
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
ORIGINS: Northwest Ordinance (1787) Art. 6: There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
ORIGINS: “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)
Did the End of War Mean the End of Slavery?
Here is a photograph taken at Fort Sumter on Friday, April 14, 1865. That was a special day for the Union coalition –a kind of “mission accomplished” moment as Col. Robert Anderson returned with a delegation of notables, including abolitionists like Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison, to raise the American flag once again over the fort in Charleston harbor where the Civil War had begun almost exactly four years earlier.
Note the cracked glass plate from this seemingly ruined photograph now in the collection of the Library of Congress. But look what happens to this image when it is digitized at a high resolution and then magnified.
That’s Rev. Henry Ward Beecher speaking on the afternoon of Friday, April 14, 1865, from what he called “this pulpit of broken stone.” William Lloyd Garrison was there, but not Frederick Douglass, who believed that it was premature to celebrate.
Re-Organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1865)
“Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot, or [while] any discrimination exists between white and black…”
–Frederick Douglass, (May 9, 1865)