Lincoln and Civil Rights

The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This was intended to be a narrow vision of Civil Rights which applied to those white, propertied males over the age of 21. Additionally the plight of slavery was struck from the early drafts of the document. It would be four score and seven years until this omission would be corrected.

Abraham Lincoln was born in the slave state of Kentucky on February 12, 1809. He grew up in a poor family and was raised to farm work. His father was in the habit of "renting him out" to other farms for labor. If Lincoln did not hate slavery then he certainly grew to dislike the idea of slavery. He felt it was an outrage that someone worked in the sun all day and someone else would get the money.

From August to October of 1958 Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in a series of seven debates in which slavery was the main issue, especially the expansion of slavery into the territories. These were issues which divided the nation at the time and fed the paranoid ideas of a Southern conspiracy to spread slavery. Lincoln's ideas, eloquence and popularity during the debates led to his nomination as the Republican Party's choice for President.

One plank in the platform of the newly founded Republican Party was the resolution that slavery would not expand beyond the states in which it already existed. During the election of 1860 Abraham Lincoln led the led the battle for this idea. The Republican victory in that election resulted in seven Southern states declaring their secession from the Union even before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861. Both the outgoing and incoming U.S. administrations rejected secession, regarding it as rebellion.

In January 1 of 1863 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." The Proclamation had to be spun as a war measure in order to make it palatable to the majority of those in the Northern states who had racist feelings.

By the middle of 1863 the war did not bode well for the North and the President had an unsure future for reelection. He was concerned about passing the war to another who would not have the same aims as he. Lincoln invited Frederick Douglass to a White House meeting in August of that year. One topic they discussed was the use agents in the South to encourage slaves to run away from the plantations. Douglas commented, "What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him." This tactic was never completed as Sherman made his march to the sea and the tide of war favored the North.

On November 19, 1863 Lincoln stood up and began a speech with these now famous words, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." In that first sentence he harkened back to the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. In effect he placed that founding document into the Constitution of the United States and created a new yardstick by which government and people measure themselves.

The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 and two days later Abraham Lincoln gave his last public speech. He spoke of the difficult road of Reconstruction. He illustrated the work which Louisiana had done to reenter the Union. He also went on record advocating voting rights for African American. John Wilkes Booth was a member of the audience. He vowed, "That is the last speech he will make." A white supremacist and Confederate activist, Booth made good on his threat. The President was assassinated three days after that speech was delivered.

The force of Lincoln's dream was felt into the post civil war Reconstruction era. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment established citizenship for any person born within the United States and provided the guarantees of the Bill of Rights for them. The 15th Amendment prohibited each government in the United States to prevent a citizen from voting based on that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude (i.e., slavery.)

Lincoln had the idea that slavery was an unnatural state for the country to tolerate. Legislative material recommending the cessation of slavery were often modified or dropped in order to have a piece of law passed. He also needed to placate the racist North by modifying information to be more palatable and appear to meet their needs. Thus we see his growth from the placid view that slavery would eventually disappear to the development of a "John Brown" mentality to foment slave agitation in the South. Politics and time certainly moved Lincoln along this road.