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48  Lincoln, God, and Freedom: A Promise Fulfilled Lucas E. Morel Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.—Abraham Lincoln to Thurlow Weed, March 15, 1865 Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.—Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” April 14, 1876 8hen Abraham Lincoln assumed the office of the presidency, he declared at the outset of his inaugural address that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” He was quoting from his first debate with U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas in August 1858 and added, “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Appealing to “the people of the Southern States,” he went on to remind them of Congress’s oath to support the fugitive slave clause (as part of “the whole Constitution”) and of his own oath taken “with no mental reservations.” He even endorsed a possible amendment specifying “that the federal government shall never lincoln, god, and freedom 49 interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.”1 Simply put, in his first official statement as president, Lincoln showed no intention of disturbing America’s “peculiar institution” and gave little indication he would go down in history as the Great Emancipator. None of this was lost on the famous escaped slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass. He read Lincoln’s inaugural address as a declaration of “his complete loyalty to slavery in the slave States” and declared, “what an excellent slave hound he is.” Douglass concluded, “If we held the Constitution, as held by Mr. Lincoln, no earthly power could induce us to swear to support it.”2 Moreover, after the firing upon Fort Sumter, Douglass wrote that “war for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.” In his mind, emancipation and the enlistment of black troops were the surest means of ending the war.3 Lincoln would resist both as explicit war measures until he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.4 On August 22, 1862, exactly one month before he announced his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln put the abolition of slavery in its proper constitutional and wartime context. In a now famous reply to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Lincoln declared, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” While he did close his public letter to Greeley by affirming “my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free,” his reply focused on his “official duty”: to wit, “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.”5 This was an apt summation of Lincoln’s policy throughout the war: namely, to save the constitutional union of the American states first and foremost, with emancipation of slaves viewed only as a means to that end, only if necessary, and only under certain circumstances. Lincoln did eventually seek to destroy slavery in rebel-held territory (through the Emancipation Proclamation) and then throughout the United States (through the Thirteenth Amendment), but the path to these objectives would illustrate what he understood about the nature of self-government and the ways of Divine Providence. Abraham Lincoln was a constitutionalist first and last, devoted to the rule of law as manifested in the slow but deliberate processes of laws and courts and with public opinion as the ultimate driver of political progress. This meant that what the public thought of its government...

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