Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

the Th
  irteenth Amendment gathered support, a new abolitionist and 
antiracist agenda emerged concerning the civic status of those who 
were to be freed from slavery. Lincoln had repeatedly declared that 
slaves were part of humankind and that it was blasphemy to belittle 
or deny this, as he thought Stephen Douglas and other Democratic 
leaders did. But Lincoln’s vehemence on the equal humanity of the 
former slaves did not mean that they were all simply Americans 
who were entitled, once released from slavery, to equal citizenship. 
As we have seen, he long believed that they would remain a sort of 
alien or stranger and should be invited to leave North America and 
found a land of their own in Africa or the Caribbean.
72
 
In a speech at Charleston on September 18, 1858—part of his 
famous debating duel with Stephen Douglas—Lincoln had insisted, 
“I am not, nor have I ever been, in favor of making voters or jurors 
of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold offi
  ce, nor to intermarry 
with white people.”
73
 Th
  is view of the Negro and his rights was not 
lightly held, but it did change in the course of the confl ict. 
In the last year of the war Lincoln gave up his long-held attach-
ment to the policy of encouraging freed people to leave the United 
States and fi nd a new life in Africa. He found that colonization 
was rejected not only by black abolitionists and church leaders but 
also by the “contrabands” who had fl ed the Confederacy. Elizabeth 
Keckley, seamstress and confi dante to the president’s wife, Mary 
Todd Lincoln, and herself a former slave, headed the Contraband 
Relief Association in Washington, D.C.
74
  Th
 e president was 
72  Lincoln’s long attachment to the colonization idea is documented by 
Eric Foner in “Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on 
Lincoln and His World, Eric Foner, ed., New York 2008, pp. 135–66.
73  Speech of September 18, 1858, taken from Harold Holzer’s Th e Lincoln-
Douglas Debates, New York 1993, p. 189.  Th
  is was not an off hand  remark, 
but rather forms part of a careful introduction to his speech. However, on 
one point it jars with the positive terms he used more than a year before to 
refer to the enfranchisement of some blacks in the early United States. In 
a speech on June 26, 1857, on the Dred Scott ruling he cites the dissenting 
opinion by Judge Curtis, which had shown that some free blacks in fi ve states 
in the 1780s did exercise the vote. While not advocating giving the vote to free 
blacks Lincoln seemed keen to stress that, contra Chief Justice Taney, some 
free blacks did have (voting) rights in the early republic.
74 Foner, 
Fiery Trial, p. 257.
50  an unfinished revolution

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curious about the outlook of the contrabands and Keckley arranged 
for a few to visit the White House. As we have noted, the “con-
trabands” had pressured the Union authorities to take a stand on 
slavery. Now they helped to persuade Lincoln to give up the idea of 
colonization, which African Americans had many reasons to reject. 
A point they sometimes made that may have had a special appeal 
to Lincoln was the argument of “unrequited labor.” After all, the 
slaves’ toil had built the seat of government in Washington, D.C., 
and many fortunes in both South and North.
75
 Th
  ere was also the 
emphatic rejection voiced by the black leader Edward Th
 omas: “Are 
you an American? Are you a Patriot? So are we. Would you spurn 
all absurd, meddlesome, impudent propositions for your coloniza-
tion in a foreign country? So do we.”
76
By the time of the Lincoln’s second inauguration, in March 1865, 
the president was less constrained than on earlier occasions and 
placed slavery as central to the confl ict in a way that he had previ-
ously avoided. He gave vent to his sense of the heavy wrong that his 
nation had committed by permitting an extremity of human bond-
age. He declared that each side in the still unfi nished confl ict had 
looked for “an easier triumph” but had not been able to contrive “a 
result less fundamental and astounding.” He saw the carnage of the 
war as perhaps God’s punishment for the nation’s “off ences” and con-
cluded that he could only hope and pray that “this mighty scourge of 
war” would come to a speedy end. He added: “Yet if God wills that it 
continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman’s two hundred 
and fi fty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop 
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with 
the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be 
said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” 
75  See Foner’s essay in Our Lincoln, Eric Foner, ed., pp. 135–66. Manisha 
Sinha’s contribution to this volume also cites the African Americans’ infl u-
ence in changing his mind on the question. See her “Allies for Emancipation: 
Lincoln and Black Abolitionists,” pp. 167–98. In this same volume James 
Oakes argues that the “unrequited labor” strand in Lincoln’s rejection of slavery 
became more marked in the late 1850s and the war years, in his essay “Natural 
Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at 
Lincoln and Race,” pp. 109–34.
76 Allen 
Guelzo, 
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: the End of Slavery in 
America, New York 2004, p. 19.
introduction  51

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