Abraham Lincoln did not consider himself an abolitionist

The argument

Abraham Lincoln did not consider himself to be an abolitionist. He did feel that slavery was morally wrong, but he did not wish to change the law in order to eradicate it — and on this argument that gap between private conviction and political intention is the whole of the matter. The distinction was a real one at the time, not a modern refinement. Abolitionists were set on changing constitutional law to end slavery and to give Black people equal rights. Lincoln did not agree with that programme; he did not wish to alter the constitution. Someone who believes an institution is wrong but declines to use the available legal means to end it holds a position meaningfully different from the people demanding its abolition, and Lincoln placed himself, by his own account, outside their number. His record before the presidency is offered as evidence of the same distance. In a court case in the 1830s, the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln represented a Kentucky slave holder — appearing, that is, on behalf of the interest an abolitionist existed to oppose. In the 1850s he spoke about sending slaves back to Africa, theorizing in a speech that doing so would resolve the racism and the problems surrounding slavery in the United States. That proposal treats the presence of Black people in the United States as the problem to be solved rather than their enslavement, which is not a position any abolitionist held. The conclusion drawn is that Lincoln, compared with the true abolitionists of his own time, was far from the progressive and slavery-ending President that history has painted him to be. If the moral case did not move him to act against slavery in law, then the eventual action requires some other explanation — which is what this position supplies in pointing to political power.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Abraham Lincoln was an abolitionist because he wanted to end slavery and felt slavery was morally unjust.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise is roughly accurate about the 1850s but is asked to support a claim about motive it cannot carry. Lincoln consistently opposed the extension of slavery into the territories while disclaiming an intention to interfere with it where it already existed — a position with a stated legal rationale, that the federal government lacked the constitutional power, rather than an absence of conviction. [Rejecting P2] None of the three items establishes what the premise needs. A lawyer's client is not evidence of the lawyer's views, and in the case usually cited he had appeared on the opposite side in a comparable matter. Colonisation was a widely held position at the time, including among some antislavery figures, and he moved away from it during the war. And declining to amend the constitution in the 1850s is hard to reconcile with his advocacy of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery by amendment and which he actively pressed for in 1864 and 1865. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow even if every premise is granted. That someone was not an abolitionist in the movement's own sense shows his position differed from theirs, not that his motive was political power. The evidence usually offered for a political reading — the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and its exemption of the loyal border states and Union-held areas — is not what this argument cites.