Slavery/ Slavery In The Territories term paper 9737

Slavery in the Territories, c

to prohibit slavery in the territories it ..

Historian Allen C. Guelzo noted that President “Lincoln…embodied the complexity of American opposition to slavery. The end of slavery owed something to a sense of awakened moral responsibility, but it also owed far more than we have been willing to admit to the long swing of ideas about political economy, and to the public’s revulsion toward specific events, such as the efforts of slaveholders to gag debate over slavery in Congress. The president had no illusions about his own sanctity or his enemies’ depravity, and he was constantly aware of the price being paid in human lives and treasure for even the noblest of results.”³¹³ On January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed the 13th Amendment. Although legally he did not need to do so, President Lincoln signed the act. It would be ratified after his death but by the end of 1865.

Slavery in the United States - Wikipedia

At the same time, President Lincoln helped shift public opinion on emancipation – sufficiently that slave-holding Maryland approved in the fall of 1864 a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. John Hay wrote: “The most striking instance of this new disposition in the discussion of this vexed question is found, not in Congress, though Frank Blair in the House of Representatives and Senator Henderson in the Senate have talked with eminent appositness and gravity upon this matter, but as the people are invariably before their leaders in this country, and Congress reflects (not illustrates) public opinion the most significant indications of this new and dispassionate consideration of this vastly important concern, is found among the leading Conservative citizens and presses of the Border States. Especially in Maryland is this becoming evident. In this, the most conservative and dignified of the old Colonial Commonwealths; in this home of the only true aristocracy of the English emigration in this State; which more than any other preserved unbroken the mould of social and religious caste, the exercise of the soundest and most progressive common sense is being brought to the consideration of this weighty matter.”²⁸²

Missouri Compromise | HistoryNet

On one subject there was absolutely no compromise for President Lincoln – trading in slaves. Historian James Oakes wrote: “Ever since the importation of slaves had been banned in 1808 the U.S. government had, in Frederick Douglass’s words, ‘winked at the accursed slave trade.’ Shortly after Lincoln took office, the government stopped winking. Within weeks of his inauguration the new President ordered his secretary of the interior, Caleb Smith, to assume a centralized responsibility for the prosecution of those who smuggled African slaves into the country. Smith understood how deeply Lincoln detested slave traders, and he quickly assembled a crackerjack team of lawyers and investigators.”²⁸³ The issue came to a head in 1861 when the case of Captain Nathaniel Gordon came to trial in New York. President Lincoln refused to grant clemency to Gordon, who was convicted of picking up a shipment of slaves in the Congo.

RACE - History - Expansion of Slavery in the U.S.

The colonization movement was spurred in part by the perceived threat of violence between the races. Lincoln’s own hometown in Springfield, Illinois was not immune from harassment of its black residents. Some white Americans like Lincoln saw colonization as a way to solve a problem for which they saw no other solution. Mr. Lincoln understood that he had a responsibility not only to free the slaves, but to deal with the social and economic consequences of 4 million slaves who would have freedom but no obvious economic sustenance. Lincoln recognized the racism that prevailed in both the North and South. Historian David Lightner wrote: “Lincoln’s struggle to win popular acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation explains his public preoccupation in 1862 with colonization experiments.”²⁴⁷

This 1854 map shows slave states (grey), free states (red), and U.S

Though the immediate impact of the Emancipation Proclamation may have been limited, its eventual impact was enormous. Legal scholar George Anastaplo wrote: “The emancipation of so massive a body of slaves made slavery itself quite vulnerable in the Country at large. Such slavery as then existed in North America could find intelligent defenders in this Country only if virtually all members of the slaves’ race were subjected to slavery. If a significant number were free, and could develop themselves as free and responsible residents here, an argument based upon the supposed natural basis for African slavery would no longer be tenable. Slavery could not survive, in a regime such as ours, if it clearly rested as much as it would have had to rest (after the Emancipation Proclamation) upon obvious accidents of geography and history.”²³⁸

territories (green) with Kansas at the center

Critics pointed out that the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in areas of the South that the Union army did not control. Pro-abolition Congressman George W. Julian later testified “how wisely [Lincoln] employed a grant popular delusion in the salvation of his country. His proclamation had no present legal effect within territory not under the control of our arms; but as an expression of the spirit of the people and the policy of the Administration, it had become both a moral and a military necessity.”²²³