The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

by James Oakes

Most of what Lincoln had to say about slavery and the Constitution was packed into the six years between the Peoria address in late 1854 and his first inaugural address in early 1861. But in those years Lincoln proved an eloquent, if unoriginal, advocate for the antislavery constitutional tradition. He repeatedly insisted that the Constitution recognized slaves only as persons, never as property. He vowed to abide by the federal consensus by not interfering directly with slavery in the states where it existed, but he denounced the tendency to spread proslavery constitutional principles into the free states. He always said that the guiding spirit of the Constitution was the principle of fundamental human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. The antislavery Constitution shaped his antislavery politics. Lincoln believed that Congress could, “under the Constitution,” abolish slavery in Washington, DC, that the federal government could ban slavery from all US territories, and that accused fugitive slaves were entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, in particular the rights of due process.