As President, Lincoln swore to preserve, protect, and defend the republic of States that had once agreed to unite together. Each State chose to join the original confederation of States. However, when Southern States chose to separate from that union, they were told that they could not do so by the Northern States. Lincoln, a Northerner, felt that it was his duty as President of the United States of America to oppose the Southern States that wished to create their own Country where the States were not subject to the will of the Northern States. It was for that primary reason , States Rights, that The Confederate States of America was formed.

Slavery was the most prominent point of contention between the two sides, but not the only one. It was Lincoln's position, prior to his first term, to be against slavery. He campaigned against it, yet he did not act upon it until he needed to hurt the "Rebel" Southern States. Lincoln did not condone slavery, but as the US President he felt his higher duty was to preserve the collective union of States first. Lincoln found himself confronted with a Civil War and political issues like slavery quickly dropped in priority.

The EP was a way to kill two birds with one stone. Freeing the slaves while being the correct thing to do for the nation also served to hurt the South as the Union Army freed the Southern slaves as they traveled through the various Southern States. Many of these freed slaves joined the Union Army and served in segregated all black units.

Slavery was not something that the Southern States in America invented. History shows that it had been practiced around the world for thousands of years. That does not however make it right. Slavery in America ended with the EP, but it would be 100 years later that America would pass a Civil Rights Act. Today there remain still those that carry hate and intolerance in their backward hearts and minds. Only time and better understanding will ever change intolerance and racial fanatics. In this all races are guilty.

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Well stated PFWT! It's easy to call the game plan from the cheap seats especially if its 150 yrs later.

You posed a great question to Wade like the question you pose here...What else could he have done? And of the millions of other paths a few might have been better; but undoubtedly some paths would have been much worse. And even if Douglas was president, and there is no doubt about what he felt of slavery, he would have undoubtedly had to play at least political games to accomplish the end of slavery.

I believe that I have read everything Lincoln has written. And his writings show a guy psychologically traumatized by the cessation and war. Just cant imagine what it'd be like to draft young boys and send them off to war, many to their deaths, and their purpose in war is to kill Americans. Even back when he proposed sending Blacks to Africa, Lincoln expressed negativity for slavery, the sending back thing was a compromise 'cause he saw no way of slavery ending.

He always expressed negativity to slavery; so I'm pretty sure it was genuine; but his writings dont show him being all that broken up about slavery not ending. I dont think he was an abolitionist doing what he had to do politically to free the slaves.

Oh the EP also allowed Blacks to be conscripted. That was another reason for the EP.

Sorry, PFWT...been away and just saw your question.

1. I don't think the decision to suspend habeas corpus did anything to change the length of the war, any more than I think the internment of Japanese-Americans did anything for the prosecution of the war against Tojo and the Emperor of Japan.
2. The compromises he made with respect to slavery....that's a much harder call. The reality was that without the war, slavery would likely have remained for at least another 2-3 decades. And given the efficiency parallels between plantation slavery in the South and industrial capitalism of the corporate sort that came on the scene later in the 19th century, the lack of actual Southern abolition in 1865 could conceivably have made expansion of slavery more attractive in the North. Without the military victory against the south providing the exclamation point to the argument about the evil of the defeated institution ("victory shows essential evil of slavery"), northern industrialists seeking profit might well have taken steps to expand slave labor.
I simply don't know enough about the political dynamic in the north -- how powerful were those who didn't want emancipation in the north, how much influence did they have over war appropriations, etc. I just don't know.
I do know, however, that the best evidence that compares the material conditions of free labor in the north and of plantation slaves in the south suggests that in every economic sense other than their abilities to choose their place of employment and to move from one geographic location to another, the average working and living conditions of free industrial labor in the north were no better than the average working and living conditions of plantation slaves in the south in 1861. Industrialists of the North in the nineteenth century were at least as Dickensian in their on-the-job treatment and pay of their workers than were plantation owners, and in many cases worse.
Popular tale-telling loves to point fingers at the life of laboring classes under Rockefeller and the other "robber barons" of the late 19th century. But the industrialists of the North in 1860 were worse. And part of the reason was that, despite corporate models that draw heavily on the organizational efficiencies demonstrated by ante-bellum plantations, Rockefeller et al could not adopt the full slave model because in their victory over the South, Lincoln, Grant, and the rest demonstrated not military superiority but moral superiority.

It's a truly complicated counterfactual question you ask and I don't have a good answer. The compromises Lincoln made with respect to those northern slaves may have been politically necessary. And, in the long run, the North won. Lincoln was a politician and he was successful.

But that doesn't make him a "great" president. Great presidents (e.g., Washington) find ways to transcend the ways of political success that "need" the moral hypocrisy far more than Lincoln did.
Great presidents find ways better than Machiavelli, better than realpolitick.

Lincoln could not.

He was successful. He deserves credit for helping eliminate the legitimacy of the "peculiar institution". He does not deserve a place on coins and Mt. Rushmore and half of the "President's Day" holiday.

IMO.

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Oh, and by the way, for whoever pointed out that slavery had been around essentially forever: American plantation slavery was *NOT* the same model of slavery that we see "throughout history." Slavery prior to the New World model of plantation production was almost entirely driven by military conquest. Lose a war, and you became slaves of the winner. Sometimes this meant slavery for your family for generations, much more often it was the kind of slavery that the slave could "earn the way out of", if not for themselves, for their children or grandchildren.

Plantation slavery in the Americas was far different. It combined the worst of that older form of slavery with the worst of feudal models of serfdom where the serf was literally bound with the land he lived on and its owner, and then added the insidious modern notions of "race" to reduce people by the color of their skin to a form of "non-human" wealth.

I agree that abolition of slavery was not Lincoln's #1 objective. His #1 objective was preservation of the Union.

The problem is, if you must compromise with respect to the core principles to preserve the Union, is the Union truly worth preserving? Three presidents in American history (and those in the legislative and judicial branches that went along with them) made bigger compromises to those core principles than any others: One was Roosevelt with the internment of Japanese Americans. The second was Bush the Younger with the Patriot Act. And the third, and, arguably, the greatest compromiser of all, was Lincoln.

I for one am not convinced that degree of compromise is justifiable. Any more than the compromises wanted by the colonial Tories of 1775 were justifiable to preserve "England".

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The cost of the war in human deaths alone is almost incomprehensible. At least ten percent of all white men of military age died in that war, and recent estimates using more rigorous methodologies have pushed that figure still higher (evidence shows that Southern military deaths were grossly underreported). As many as 22 percent of Southern white men between the ages of 20 and 24 lost their lives. Think about that for a moment: more than a fifth of their college-age men were wiped out in four years!

Bear in mind, too, that the population of the United States was only about 31 million at the time. If we scale up the death toll to today's population levels, we're looking at a horrific loss of anywhere between 7 and 9 million soldiers alone, not counting civilian deaths.

Incidentally, there's no evidence Abraham Lincoln ever uttered the aphorism attributed to him in that meme. It first appeared in print in 1907, decades after his death.

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I always thought it was Mark Twain who was credited with saying something to the same affect first.

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It's been attributed to him, too, but like I said, it didn't appear in print until long after he was dead. Though there is a verse in the Bible that expresses a similar concept:

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Times were VERY different back then.
It's kind of like us trying to compare today's NFL against the NFL of the 1960's.
(Yes, I KNOW that slavery and war is not the same, just trying to show something that maybe some here can more identify with)
Lincoln did what he could do to end slavery. I'd say, that for that time in history, that's NOT a small thing.
Many northern WHITE men died fighting for the end of slavery.
Was Lincoln perfect? No. Then again, who of us IS perfect?
Who of us would have had the GUTS to do what Lincoln did?
It ended up with him getting a bullet in the head for his troubles.

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Martyrdom doesn't retroactively justify a man's actions, nor does doing one's best necessarily mean one did right (or even well).

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Ok.....then I guess we should have just kept slavery.😲
I guess for some it's easy to judge someone then to put themselves in the other person's shoes, and see if he would have had the nads to do what the person he is attacking did. (If during that same time in history)
No human is perfect. Not one of us.

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