Lincoln, Race and Slavery: A Biographical Overview

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Locating Lincoln at a fixed place along the line of nineteenth-century thinking on race and slavery is not easy. Although he said much about slavery, he said little about race. Lincoln's statements about slavery leave little reason to doubt his assertion that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel” (1). Slavery was “a monstrous injustice” and “the sum of all villanies” (2). He had seen plantation slavery firsthand in his twenties, probably while flatboating goods down the Mississippi, “and the horrid pictures are in my mind yet” (3). In 1837, while still a junior Illinois state representative, he joined with another like-minded Illinois representative to protest “resolutions” adopted by the state legislature, endorsing “domestic slavery” in the southern states. “The institution of slavery,” Lincoln declared, “is founded on both injustice and bad policy” (4). A decade later, as an Illinois congressman, he voted for the Wilmot Proviso—which banned slavery from the territory acquired in the Mexican War—“as good as forty times.” In January 1849, he proposed a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, a bill that ultimately failed. Lincoln explained the failure with the following: “finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence, I dropped the matter knowing that it was useless to prosecute the business at that time” (5). He considered “foreign slave traders” as “enemies of the human race,” and characterized “slave-breeders and slave-traders” at home as “a small, odious and detested class” (6). And given how contrary slavery was to both natural law and America's republican ideology, it was inconceivable to him that slavery could endure permanently in the United States, or was ever intended to by the Founders. Even in plain economic terms, slavery was doomed to extinction by self-suffocation, and Lincoln “was quite sure it would not outlive the century” (7).