John C. Calhoun GPA Healy

John C. Calhoun, GPA Healy
National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.

In a letter, Lincoln dismissed the claim that slavery was the South's affair. There were, he said, many parts of the North, in Ohio for instance, 'where you cannot avoid seeing such sights as slaves in chains, being carried to miserable destinations, and the heart is wrung. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.' Lincoln was as much concerned for the slave-owner as for the slave - the institution morally destroy the man supposed to benefit from it. It was thus more important, as Lincoln saw it, to end slave-owning than to end slavery itself. A Kentuckian had once told him: 'Slave-ownership indicates the gentleman of leisure, who is above labor and scorns it.' The image of the strutting slave-owner, corrupted and destroyed by the wretch at his heels, haunted Lincoln. He wept for the South in its self-inflicted moral degradation.

It was because slavery made him miserable, and because he thought it was destroying the nation, not least the South, that Lincoln reentered politics and helped to create the new Republican Party, primarily to prevent slavery's extension.

Lincoln argued that the logic of the South's case, which was that slavery was good for the negroes, would be to extend it to white men too. Lincoln said it was therefore urgent that there should be a union of all men, of whatever politics, who opposed the expansion of slavery, and said he was 'ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power.' His speech was justice, equity, truth and right set alight by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong.

'A house divided against itself cannot stand. I do not expect the House to fall.

Lincoln pointed out again and again that even the South was, in its heart, aware that slavery was wrong. 'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.'

Blacks, Davis insisted, were better off as slaves in the South than as tribesmen in Africa. It was in the interests of blacks to be slaves.

Dixie