“In politics Mr Lincoln told the truth when he said he had ‘always hated slavery as much as any Abolitionist’ but I do not know that he deserved a great deal of credit for that for his hatred of oppression & wrong in all its forms was constitutional – he could not help it,” wrote Attorney Samuel C. Parks, a longtime friend of Abraham Lincoln.1 Contemporary Robert H. Browne recalled Abraham Lincoln telling him in 1854: “The slavery question often bothered me as far back as 1836-40. I was troubled and grieved over it; but the after the annexation of Texas I gave it up, believing as I now do, that God will settle it, and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of so great an evil; but for the present it is our duty to wait.”2
Browne came to know Mr. Lincoln as a teenage assistant in the Bloomington law office of David Davis and Asahel Gridley. “One evening as I sat and talked with him in the office, in order to answer his question as to what was the groundwork on my belief on slavery, I told him what I knew and has seen of it in the mild slaveholding city of St. Louis, and what my father knew about it for several years.” Browne recalled that he “talked an hour, with frequent questions interspersed by Mr. Lincoln, who was deeply interested in every fact and feature of this slavery business in the city of St. Louis, as we saw and understood it for so many years. When I had finished, he was in deep and profound study, and I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. I said, in the usual way, not louder than ordinary conversation, ‘Mr. Lincoln, do you wonder that my father and myself were Abolitionists, or do you doubt our sincerity?’ This disclosed that he had not been asleep, but in deep thought. He sat firm, with not so much as a muscle of his face relaxed, as he had done through much of my recital. His face and its firm, drawn expression was like one in pain. He made a motion of some kind with his arm or head, and broke the strain, which, I remember, relieved me very much. He drew out a sighing ‘No. I saw it all myself when I was only a little older than you are now, and the horrid pictures are in my mind yet. I feel drawn toward you because you have seen and know the truth of such sorrow. No wonder that your father told Judge [Stephen A.] Douglas he had nothing but contempt for party platforms or technicalities that held and bound a free man in a free State, directly or remotely, to sustain a system of such unqualified cruelties and horrors….'”3
The Morality and Legality of Slavery
Lincoln often said that he had believed slavery was wrong for as long as he could remember. In a speech in Chicago on July 10, 1858 Lincoln said he of slavery: “I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.”4 Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa wrote: “For Lincoln…the entire antebellum debate came down to the question of whether the Negro was or was not a human being. If he was a human being, then he was included in the proposition that all men are created equal. If he was included in that proposition then it was a law of nature antecedent to the Constitution that he ought to be free and that civil society has as its originating purpose the security of his freedom and of the fruits of his labor under law.”5 Lincoln’s views on slavery, however, were at odds with the predominant racist feelings of Illinois residents. Early Lincoln chronicler Francis Fisher Browne noted: “During the years of Lincoln’s service in the Legislature of Illinois, the Democratic party was strongly dominant throughout the State. The feeling on the subject of slavery was decidedly in sympathy with the South. A large percentage of the settlers in the southern and middle portions of Illinois were from the States in which slave labor was sustained, and although the determination not to permit the institution to obtain a foothold in the new commonwealth was general, the people were opposed to any action which should affect its condition where it was already established. During the session of 1836-’37, resolutions of an extreme pro-slavery character were carried through the Legislature by the Democratic party. The aim of the measure was to prevent the Abolitionists from obtaining a foothold in the State.”6 Mr. Lincoln and a Whig colleague from Sangamon County introduced a petition in the legislature condemning slavery. Lincoln legal scholar Paul Finkelman wrote: “This early foray into the constitutional issues of slavery suggests that Lincoln, even as a young man, understood the constitutional limitations as well as the constitutional possibilities of fighting slavery.”7 He also understood the reality of his isolation on the slavery issue. Lincoln scholar Saul Sigelschiffer observed: “There were few sections of Illinois where prejudice against the Negro was stronger than in Sangamon County, which had been settled chiefly by Kentuckians.”8