Authoring, Researching, Reporting and Other Work

Learning On-Line by Howard Taylor

Lincoln and the Abolitionists

Differentiated higher level activity

"What the President Thought about Slavery in April of 1864"

From a letter to Albert G. Hodges, Monday, April 04, 1864----Stating his position on slavery

The original letter is posted on the Library of Congress Memories Collection.

The actual letter from Lincoln to Hodges is located on the Library of Congress "Lincoln Papers Collection" at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/almss/ln001.html

 

 

STUDENT TASKS

The goal of studying this letter is to learn how Abraham Lincoln changed from his lawyer years to the last months of the Civil War, and where he stood on total abolition of slavery, and equality of blacks.

To make your job easier, I have used a transcribed version of the 3-page letter.  Your jobs are to go to the transcribed letter below.  Use it to conduct your jobs.

1.  Read the letter.

2.  Check the vocabulary list to make sure all word-meanings are known.

3.  Click the word underlined, that is a hotspot (hyperlink).  This will take you to another web link that has a "thought question."  See if you can answer the question.  Sometimes another hyperlink will be on this new page to help in finding the answer.  Sometimes the question will have to be answered with your own idea or opinion.

4.  For a final job, click the FINAL hyperlink, and follow its' directions.

 

The 10 Blue words are possibly new vocabulary words.  Phrases are conceptual, and questions will be provided for you to answer.

If you like, send your answers to:  Learning On-Line Submission Form

 

This transcribed copy of the famous "If Slavery is Not Wrong . . ." letter is from LINCOLN: SPEECHES AND WRITINGS 1859-1865,

The Library of America. 1989, N.Y.  Don E. Fehrenbacher, Editor

 

THE LETTER

 

To:  A. G. Hodges, Esq.   Frankfort, Ky.                                                   

From:   Executive Mansion, Washington, April 4, 1864.

My dear Sir:

You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I verbally said the other day, in your presence, to Governor

Bramlette and Senator Dixon. It was about as follows"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing

is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency

conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.  It was in the oath I took that

I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not

take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power,

and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil adminis­tration this oath even forbade me

to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.  I had publicly declared this

many times, andto the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that

government—that nation—of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet

re­serve the constitution? 

By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life;

but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by

becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong,

I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution,

if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.

When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an

indispensable necessity. When a little later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks,

I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, Gen. Hunter attempted military

emancipation,

I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and  May, and July 1862  I

 made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity

for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was,

in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand

upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident.

More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white

military force,—no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand

soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no cavilling.  We have the men;

and we could not have had them without the measure.

     "And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing

the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union

side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only

because he can not face the truth."

      I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim

 

not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the

 

nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending

 

seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South,

 

shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and

 

goodness of God.

 

Yours truly [A. Lincoln]