Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Rob Wick]

Kate,

With all due respect, you're mixing up some things here.

First, what Lincoln personally felt about slavery and what the Constitution (in his mind) allowed him to do are two different things. Lincoln never believed that the government could end slavery without an amendment to the Constitution, even though he personally found the practice repugnant. He did not believe it was unconstitutional to keep slavery out of the territories, and while I am certainly no Constitutional scholar, I would question whether or not it was not allowed, given that the Northwest Ordinance did keep slavery out of those territories. Indeed, Stephen A. Douglas believed each territory had the right of popular sovereignty in determining whether the state was to be free or slave.

Lincoln felt the Crittenden Compromise would allow slavery to spread into the territories unchecked, and he was opposed to that. However, he was willing to let the states decide on the Corwin Amendment, which as he saw it simply codified his understanding of the law as it stood.

You also have to remember the time surrounding Lincoln's oft-quoted statement about preservation of the Union. He made it in response to Horace Greeley's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" editorial in the summer of 1862. At the time he responded to Greeley, the Emancipation Proclamation was nearly ready to be unveiled. It was almost two years after the Crittenden Compromise that Lincoln made that declaration, and he did it as a political move which he believed to be necessary.

Whether Lincoln "cared" about the slaves in the Southern states is a subjective question. He knew there was nothing he could do to stop slavery there short of a Constitutional amendment. Read Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial on Lincoln's evolving view of race and slavery.

Best
Rob