Discuss the role of Abraham Lincoln in the evolution of the slavery in the USA?
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Answer:
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln often expressed moral opposition to slavery in public and private.[1] "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong", he stated in a now-famous quote. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel."[2] However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, was complex and politically challenging.
As early as the 1850s, Lincoln was attacked as an abolitionist. But while many abolitionists emphasized the sinfulness of individual owners, Lincoln did not, although he did publicly condemn the institution of slavery.[3] Lincoln was married to Mary Todd Lincoln, the daughter of a slaveowner from Kentucky. While William. Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator newspaper, and a small but growing group of other abolitionists, called for total, immediate abolition of slavery ("immediatism"), Lincoln focused on the practical goal of preventing the creation of new slave states and specifically blocking the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories.[4]
Lincoln supported excluding slavery from territories with the failed Wilmot Proviso in the 1840s. His 1850s activism was in reaction to the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act designed by his great rival, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln saw the new Act as a great evil that was only brought into being through serious and continued violence on the ground.[5] The Act was a radical departure[4] from the previous law of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had strictly banned slavery from all new states north of the 36°30′ parallel (except for Missouri).[6]
The new law directly permitted the potential vast expansion of slavery by granting settlers in any territory, for the first time and regardless of its location, the right to decide whether to permit slavery within its boundaries when they applied for it to become an official state in the Union. Lincoln was both opposed to slavery and to its extension on principle,[4] including into any new western territory that was seeking to become a full-fledged state. Lincoln also suggested that if slavery was allowed to spread it would block free labor from settling in the new states and that, as a result, the entire nation would soon become ever more dominated by slave owners.[7] This would be the inevitable result, Lincoln said, because the latter's representation in the US House of Representatives was always significantly weighted and overcounted according to the number of slaves that they held, as dictated by the Three-fifths Clause in the US Constitution, leaving free states at an increasing disadvantage in governing the nation as a whole.[8]
After Lincoln became President he, with partial compensation to owners, ended slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862 when the abolitionist goal became possible after decades of effort with the departure of the Southern members of Congress at the beginning of the Civil War. In 1861 and 1862, Lincoln tried unsuccessfully to get the loyal border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri to also do so. He repeatedly stated that his goal was the preservation of the Union, not the ending of slavery in those states in which it still existed, but throughout the war he encouraged states to abolish slavery. State abolition plans were adopted in Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas before the end of the war. While he encouraged them, Lincoln could not directly force border states to abolish slavery during the Civil War and he reasonably feared that, if he tried to do so, they would secede from the Union to join the Southern states, and that this would result both in the North losing the Civil War and in the continued existence of slavery.[9]
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