Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

“The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” If a man “continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” The “free labor system,” concluded Lincoln, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” It was precisely the lack of this hope, energy, and progress in the slave South that made the United States a House Divided.33

When they “tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we, I acknowledge the fact. . . . They are just what we would be in their situation.

surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.”

Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals?” Even if Lincoln’s own feelings would accept this, “we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. . . . A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.”

Popular sovereignty was false in principle and pernicious in practice, said Lincoln.

and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Therefore “we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism” as well as “the natural and normal condition of the laboring men, white or black.”

“The great evil of Northern free society,” insisted a South Carolina journal, “is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens.”