Abraham Lincoln Quotes
… there is no right, and ought to be no inclination of the people of the free states to enter into the slave states, and interfere with the question of slavery at all.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Speech, Chicago, 1858
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While England was strongly opposed to slavery, the English textile industry benefited from importing American Southern cotton. So many in England were supportive of the Confederacy.
The highest court in New York.
See Mark {606304}; also Matthew {606727}. Lincoln had used the “house divided” biblical metaphor in 1843 when arguing for Whig solidarity. The first political use of the Biblical metaphor and quotation with respect to American slavery appears to have been by Sam Houston in 1850 {603970}. The first use with respect to American slavery was byMassachusetts abolitionist, Edmund Quincy, in 1852. The second sentence of this famous quotation was forsaged earlier. See Lincoln, {619494} & {584918}. Also See Felix Rohatyn who used the Lincoln line to refer to poverty: {70611}.
What was particularly interesting about this quotation is that Pinkney was a political leader of Maryland, a slave state. He saw the injustice and immorality of slavery but like many others of our founding fathers assumed that ending slavery would infringe on the property rights of the slave holders. Others argued that there can be no right to deny others their basic rights—property and wealth are subordinate to natural rights. See {632258} and {632259} for more on this point.
Buchanan us considered by most historians to have been the worst or one of the worst Presidents of the United States. At this point, he was a lame duck president with Abraham Lincoln, the President Elect soon to take office. This speech, just encouraged the South more than ever and helped to bring about the Civil War. His vacillation and lack of any leadership on the slavery question exacerbated the polarization that was tearing the nation apart.
It was in fact, the following year when the South rebelled to prevent a “settlement”, but the irony was that the Civil War brought the settlement—emancipation-- faster and on less favorable terms than had they not rebelled and let the political process end slavery gradually as the majority of the nation wanted and morality dictated.
The Federal Fugitive Slave Act required all in free states to assist owners of escaped slaves to return them to their owners. In 1854 a Missouri slave owner tracked his escaped slave to Wisconsin and the Federal officials incarcerated the slave pending his return. A Wisconsin mob broke the slave out of jail and helped him escape to Canada. Sherman M. Booth, Publisher & Editor of the Wisconsin Free Soil Democrat was convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act for aiding the escape. Smith’s opinion overturned the Fugitive Slave Act on the grounds that it had usurped state’s rights. The Supreme Court overturned Smith’s ruling, but Booth was pardoned. See {587926} & {587928}. The more “dread calamity” was civil war which of course came a few years later.
Lincoln was then a Whig campaigning for his party.
The amendments failed as did the compromise.
The first anti-slavery newspaper published in the United States & the first journal in America to advocate immediate, unconditional emancipation
One of the many complaints that many people made at the time about Smith and his Mormons was that they opposed slavery. In fact, Smith not only opposed it be had a plan for compensating the slave owner and a method for paying for it. Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
