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151 8 Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Movement Richard Striner What was it in the leadership of Abraham Lincoln that set him apart from all the others who strove to end slavery? The first of the important distinctions that elevates Lincoln above the rank and file of America’s antislavery leaders is obvious enough: Lincoln was the leader who occupied the White House and meted out a series of blows to the institution of slavery that cumulatively killed it. But this preeminent distinction of the sixteenth president was part of a larger distinctiveness in overall strategy and tactics that put him in a class by himself—as the Great Emancipator. To be sure, the uniqueness of Lincoln’s contribution was based upon some long-term antislavery traditions that the Founding Fathers pioneered. The achievement of the founding generation in preventing the spread of American slavery above the Ohio River—an achievement that began with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—laid the groundwork for a program of incremental phaseout, a program that Lincoln endorsed well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation. As Lincoln put it in his “House divided” speech, Americans needed to “arrest the further spread” of slavery and “place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.”1 Lincoln made it clear that he belonged to a “gradualist” school of American antislavery leadership —and he proudly acknowledged his debt to the antislavery Founders. In 1859, he told supporters of slavery that “we mean to treat you as near as we possibly can, like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison treated you.”2 But he usually reminded his listeners that many of the Founding Fathers had hoped to see the institution of slavery reduced until it vanished from the nation 152 Richard Striner altogether. In 1860, Lincoln noted that Washington expressed “his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free states.”3 The phaseout of slavery depended on reviving the Founders’ preliminary step: a quarantine to seal off the evil. And the logic of a gradual phaseout was heightened by the time that Lincoln launched his political career by two important, subsequent developments: the founding in 1816 of the American Colonization Society, which aimed to facilitate the slow repatriation of emancipated slaves to Africa, and the influence of Great Britain’s antislavery program, which approached its culmination in 1833—when Parliament began the final phaseout of slavery with compensation to the owners. Compensation had also been employed by the American Colonization Society. The programmatic package that Lincoln espoused until late in the game comprised all of these elements, arrayed in the following sequence: (1) the revival of the Founders’ attempt to contain the institution of slavery, a program that developed a massive support base via the “Free-Soil movement” in both major parties by the 1840s; (2) the defusing of the vexing racial issue through the concept of colonization, which could make the lurid fear (and the aggressive racial hatred) of American white supremacists moot by allowing the races to go their separate ways in peace; and (3) the phaseout of slavery by means of the British method: compensation. Lincoln’s vision is easy to grasp through the picturesque devices that he used to portray it at the time. In 1854 he likened slavery to a disease—“a wen or a cancer” that could not be “cut to the bone at once,” lest the patient bleed to death. Nonetheless, “the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”4 Lincoln’s antislavery prescription was therefore to isolate the illness by preventing it from spreading any further in the body politic. Then the illness would be slowly purged away: removed from the system through the wise applications of statecraft. The partial British inspiration for the antislavery vision of Lincoln was apparent in a private memorandum that he wrote shortly after he delivered his “House divided” speech in the summer of 1858. “I have not allowed myself to forget,” he wrote, “that the abolition of the Slave-Trade by Great Brittain [sic], was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success. . . . School-boys know that [William] Wilbe[r]force, and Granville Sharpe [Sharp], helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?”5 Though he never chose to broadcast the fact that the British achievement played a role in his thinking on the slavery issue, the influence is obvious enough...

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