Honest Abe the abolitionist?
Throughout the presidential campaign of 1860, then-candidate Abraham Lincoln had all but promised not to interfere with Southern slavery, which he reiterated in his first presidential inaugural address.
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
Furthermore, Lincoln promised to enforce the fugitive slave laws as president laws passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of slaves who escaped from one state into another state or territory.
Southern secession would have made slavery more precarious without the protection of the Constitution and the Supreme Court. From a slave property standpoint, staying in the Union made more sense than leaving.
Adding further confusion are the numerous accounts from contemporary newspapers from the North, South, and Europe all of which tell the tale of a "tariff war," not the popularly-held notion that the Civil War was a "war against slavery."
It's too easy to assign blame for the Civil War on the South and slavery and intellectually lazy.
Like many other conflicts, the Civil War was decades in the making and the culmination of unresolved issues between the Northern and Southern states. And it finally came to a head during the 1860 presidential campaign and election.
In 1860, nearly all federal tax revenue was generated by tariffs there were no personal or corporate income taxes. And the Southern states were paying the majority (approximately eighty percent) of the tariffs with an impending new tariff that would nearly triple the rate of taxation.
Adding insult to injury, much of the tax revenues collected from imports in the South went to Northern industrial interests and had been for decades. The 1860 Republican platform promised more of the same, which was further eroding the trust of Southerners.
Remember that slave labor practices of the South contrasted greatly with the industries of the North. Without slave labor, most Southern plantations wouldn't have survived; there simply weren't enough workers. Slavery was inextricably linked to the South.
While the issue of slavery was, in fact, a primary concern for the South, the secessionist movement began decades before the Civil War.
In 1828, Congress passed a tariff of sixty-two percent which applied to nearly all imported goods. The purpose of the tariff was to protect Northern industries from low-priced imported goods. But it effectively increased the cost of goods for the South, which sans manufacturing capacity, relied heavily on imported goods.
At the same time, the tariff reduced the amount of British goods sold to the South, effectively making it more difficult for the British to pay for Southern cotton. It's no wonder the South would refer to the Tariff of 1828 as the "Tariff of Abominations."
The government of South Carolina declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable, creating a precarious situation between the state and the federal government. Of little surprise, President Andrew Jackson refused to accept South Carolina's defiance. Without the Compromise Tariff of 1833, it's likely that South Carolina would have moved to secede from the Union.
More tariffs in 1842 and 1857 along with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision worked to further divide the country. In May of 1860, the House of Representatives passed the Morrill Tariff Bill, the twelfth of seventeen planks in the platform of the incoming Republican Party and a priority for the soon-to-be-elected new president.
Charles Dickens, from his journal, All the Year Round, observed, "The last grievance of the South was the Morrill tariff, passed as an election bribe to the State of Pennsylvania, imposing, among other things, a duty of no less than fifty per cent on the importation of pig iron, in which that State is especially interested." (1)
At Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," he began, going on to say that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites. What he did believe was that, like all men, blacks had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust.
For much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonizationor the idea that a majority of the African-American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central Americawas the best way to confront the problem of slavery. His two great political heroes, Henry Clay & Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization; both were slave owners who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that blacks and whites could live together peaceably. Lincoln first publicly advocated for colonization in 1852, and in 1854 said that his first instinct would be "to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia" (the African state founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821).
Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed slaves at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Given the "differences" between the two races and the hostile attitudes of whites towards blacks, Lincoln argued, it would be "better for us both, therefore, to be separated." Lincoln's support of colonization provoked great anger among black leaders and abolitionists, who argued that African-Americans were as much natives of the country as whites, and thus deserved the same rights. After he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never again publicly