Abraham Lincoln on Race and Slavery

Lincolln's Attitude on Blacks Reflected in his Actions and Writings

Sep 5, 2009

President Abraham Lincoln has been called both racist and "Great Emacipator" of black slaves. He originally held the views of most whites of the time, but changed.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, a typical product of the Kentucky frontier. Kentucky was a slave state, but the backwoods wilderness of Lincoln’s earliest years had few if any slaves. Many years later, though, Lincoln said that one of the reasons his father decided to move to Indiana was the influx of slaveholders—free white farmers found it hard to compete with them.

Lincoln’s Trip to New Orleans

Young Abe’s first real exposure to human bondage came in 1828, when he was nineteen years of age. He and Allen Gentry were hired to float farm produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The two youths were awestruck by the Crescent City, with its fabulous French Quarter and wharves lined with steamboats. But they also saw the infamous slave markets of New Orleans, where black men, women, and children were bough and sold like animals. These were sights that Lincoln would never forget. Later, as a practicing lawyer, he saw some chained slaves aboard a steamboat on the Ohio River. He was unsettled and dismayed

Lincoln detested slavery, but he was no abolitionist. He hoped it would peacefully die out of its own accord, without bloodshed or violence. Lincoln felt that slavery, however abhorrent, was protected by the Constitution of the time. As an ardent Unionist, the young lawyer also felt that forced abolition would break up the United States.

He put forth his views in a letter exchange with best friend and fellow Kentuckian Joshua Speed. Speed and Lincoln were like brothers, and freely expressed innermost feelings to one another. Speed defended slavery, as a white southerner. Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Towards None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln details Lincoln’s replies. “Slavery is your own matter, “Lincoln explained, “but I have to confess I hate to see the poor creatures (Blacks) hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes (whipping) and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”

The Lincoln Douglas Debates

In 1858 Lincoln engaged in a series of debates with Senator Stephen A Douglas over slavery. Douglas was running for reelection, and Lincoln was challenging him for the position. Douglas was at the height of his fame and notoriety, known throughout as “the Little Giant” of the U.S. Senate. Lincoln was the relative unknown.

Douglas put Lincoln on the defensive, playing the “race card” by painting his opponent as someone who favored the equality of whites and blacks. The Senator knew his audience. Many of the people of southern Illinois were had southern origins, and shared the racist attitudes of the period.

Backed to the wall, Lincoln said publically that he was not for black equality. He said there was a “physical” difference between white and black that would probably always prevent them from living together in perfect equality. Blacks, in his view, were not his equal, or the equal of Douglas, in moral or intellectual development. But they were a white man’s equal in their right to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence

President Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

As the Republican presidential candidate for the 1860 election, Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery into the territories. It was the old idea that, once isolated, slavery in the Old South would die out. As President, he favored colonization of blacks to Central America for a time, but later abandoned the notion. In the beginning of the war The President’s main goal was to preserve the Union, with or without slavery. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, a war measure designed to weaken the southern Confederacy.

Lincoln and African Americans: A Summary

One of Lincoln’s more positive attributes was that he was capable of change. He invited blacks to White House functions—radical for the time. He also treated black Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass like an equal, with no reference to racial differences. In the last weeks of his life he was even proposing that black soldiers who served their country be given the vote. We cannot judge a nineteenth century man by twenty-first century standards. But is good to know that, though a man of his time, Abraham Lincoln could shed racism and change his views on African Americans.

Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Towards None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (Harper Perennial, 1994)

Gerald S. Henig and Eric Niderost, A Nation Transformed: How the Civil War Changed America Forever (Cumberland House, 2007)

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