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

by James Oakes

Lincoln once likened the Declaration to a picture, the Constitution to its frame.

The Constitution empowered Congress to ban states from importing slaves beginning in 1808, to tax slave imports before that date, and to ban slave imports into US territory immediately.

“How long, in the government of a God . . . shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this.”15

None of these rights, guaranteed to peaceful citizens, by the constitution belong to them after they have become belligerents against their own government. They thereby forfeit all protection under that sacred charter which they have thus sought to overthrow and destroy.1

It is the old debate continued. The same aspirations, fears, and tensions are there: but they arise in a new context, with new language and arguments, and a changed balance of forces.2 E. P. Thompson

With that, the war powers clause joined the Preamble, the Fourth and Fifth amendments, and the privileges and immunities clause as one of the mainstays of antislavery constitutionalism.

Later, as a senator from New York, Seward repeated his prediction on several occasions, including his famous “higher law” speech of 1850. He posited a stark distinction between gradual abolition in peacetime and immediate emancipation in wartime. Threats of southern secession posed the all-important question of “whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social and political causes, be removed by gradual, voluntary effort, and with compensation, or whether the Union shall be dissolved, and civil wars ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation.”10

In January 1861, in one last futile attempt to forestall secession, Seward once again warned that war would destroy all hope of a gradual, peaceful abolition. He repeated the warning he had first issued in 1825, that in a civil war the millions of slaves would not remain “stupid and idle spectators.” The United States had pioneered a path toward peaceful, gradual abolition, one state at a time, whereas European nations—presumably Britain, France, and the Netherlands—had imposed “simple, direct abolition, effected, if need be, by compulsion” in their Caribbean slave colonies. The attempt to dismember the Union would bring European-style abolition to the United States. The only “umpire” for secession was war, Seward warned, and in that case “what guarantee shall there be against the full development here of the fearful and uncompromising hostility to slavery which elsewhere pervades the world?”12 What John Quincy Adams had once presented as abstract doctrine, the incoming secretary of state threw down as a direct threat.

It would be more accurate to say that slavery was abolished because the Civil War radically accelerated the decades-long shift in the balance of power between slave and free states.

Lincoln even abandoned his long-standing commitment to colonization.

After December 1862, for example, Lincoln never mentioned colonization again. By early 1864 he abandoned the gradual timetables as well.

that gradualism, like compensation and colonization, was a means to the end, not the end itself. “[My] expressions of preference for gradual over immediate emancipation, are misunderstood,” Lincoln explained. He had thought a gradual timetable would make states more likely to abolish slavery, but if “those who are better acquainted with the subject” preferred immediate emancipation, “most certainly I have no objection.” Lincoln’s basic “wish,” he explained, “is that all who are for emancipation in any form, shall co-operate.” So when Arkansas went on to adopt immediate abolition in early 1864, Lincoln had no trouble endorsing it.21

The campaign for state abolition had made the Thirteenth Amendment—inconceivable in 1860—feasible in 1865.