Lincoln Research

[ELCore]

Welcome! And thanks for your efforts to correct misrepresentations of Lincoln, which are legion.

Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery on a logical level, not an emotional way.

To you, Dani: what does that mean? To all: does the statement strike you as accurate?

It seems to me that Lincoln had deep and powerful feelings about slavery, but he was also able to address the issue intellectually. (I think the best, succinct description of Lincoln that I've encountered is this: he had the heart of a poet but the mind of a scientist.) Perhaps Lincoln's "logical" approach distracts one from, or disguises, his depth of feeling?

To Lincoln, slavery was bad but something he did not really want to deal with.

I recall that Lincoln has been quoted as saying, during his presidency, that he got back into politics after Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott because Illinois would be a slave state in 15 years if the pro-slavery forces were not stopped. Even if that quotation is not itself accurate (I don't feel like hunting it down right now) there's plenty of evidence for the idea. Eventually, he thought, the Supreme Court could strike down states' anti-slavery laws as unconstitutional taking of property without due process in those cases in which slaveholders moved into free states. I think it can be argued, then, that the whole reason he got back into politics was to "deal with" slavery.