Abstract
In this age, when some charge any revision of political position as a “flip flop” and consider thoughtless consistency a praiseworthy political attribute, we would do well to remember one of the most important political figures in American history, President Abraham Lincoln, a man who learned from personal experience and changed his mind. In a letter written in 1864, one year before his assassination, Lincoln expressed a view of himself as firmly opposed to the institution of slavery. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he wrote. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Then he added an intriguing autobiographical note, “I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”1
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Notes
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:320.
Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 181.
Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 445.
Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds. Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 457.
Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 128.
Paul Finkelman, Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 2003)
For African American reactions to plans for African colonization see, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Free Black Culture and Community in the North, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 177–202.
James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 5–6.
Donald Yacovone, ed., Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004), 299.
See William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991), 208–211.
Ron Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 98.
W. M. Brewer, “Lincoln and The Border States,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 34 no. 1, (January, 1949), pp. 46–72.
David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 80.
Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford and Frank J. Williams, eds., The Emancipation Proclamation (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).
Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (London: Collier Books, [1892] 1969), 348.
Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 338–349
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Arthur Charles Cole, Centennial History of Illinois: The Era of the Civil War, 1848–1870 (Springfield, IL: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919).
Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 220
Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1984), 113–114.
Victor Searcher, The Farewell to Lincoln, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1965) 139
Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans: From the Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1983), 449–450.
Michael Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004).
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Horton, J.O. (2009). Naturally Anti-Slavery: Lincoln, Race, and the Complexity of American Liberty. In: Wilentz, S. (eds) The Best American History Essays on Lincoln. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61556-4_3
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