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

by James Oakes

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.