Lincoln’s clarity on slavery.

[David Lockmiller]

(05-16-2019 11:45 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  I don’t know but it seems to me the speech hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.

I thought that the most unusual aspect of the speech content related to the following statement made by the Kalamazoo Valley Museum personnel in the section prefacing the reprinting of Lincoln's speech entitled "What is the Speech About?":

"Anti-slavery activists felt that this expansion of slavery threatened the free labor, free market capitalist system of the Northern states. They responded by organizing a new political party in 1854, the Republican Party, and ran their first Presidential campaign in 1856."

In some support of this statement is the following paragraph from Lincoln's speech that day:

"We are a great empire. We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must inquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself. It has been said that such a race of prosperity has been run nowhere else. We find a people on the Northeast, who have a different government from ours, being ruled by a Queen. Turning to the South, we see a people who, while they boast of being free, keep their fellow beings in bondage."

What do you think?