The Public Record
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. A member of the Republican Party, he is best known for leading the nation through the Civil War and for his efforts to abolish slavery, notably through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Lincoln's leadership during this tumultuous period helped to preserve the Union and set the stage for the eventual passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States.
In all these cases it is your sense of justice and human sympathy continually telling you that the poor negro has some natural right to himself,--that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.
It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony,--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact.
You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man.
These sympathies in the bosoms of the Southern people manifest in many ways their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.
The great majority, South as well as North, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain.
But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much?
Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and slaves.
A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.
My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.
I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.
We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North and become tip-top Abolitionists, while some Northern ones go South and become most cruel slave-masters.
Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence.
This declared indifference, but, as I must think, real, covert zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.
The slave whom you cannot drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you will task him to break a hundred, and promise him pay for all he does over, he will break you a hundred and fifty.
Originally a curse for transgression upon the whole race, when, as by slavery, it is concentrated on a part only, it becomes the double-refined curse of God upon his creatures.
As labour is the common burden of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden on to the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.
Advancement--improvement in condition--is the order of things in a society of equals.
The hired labourer of yesterday labours on his own account to-day, and will hire others to labour for him to-morrow.
Equality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort.
Politicians like Abraham Lincoln
