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My essay examines how Lincoln's devotion to the American constitutional union determined how he pursued a greater protection of rights for blacks in the United States. Before 1854, his politics reflected little urgency regarding the equal protection of the laws for blacks in a nation governed by a majority-white citizenry. He was willing to maintain the union at the cost of extending the tenure of slaveholding in certain American states because it was the best chance for selfgovernment to survive and ultimately extend its benefits to all of America's inhabitants. This was true for Lincoln as long as slavery was understood to be “in the course of ultimate extinction.” However, by the 1850s white Americans in the free states became increasingly indifferent to the spread of black slavery, exemplified by the growing allure of the doctrine of “local popular sovereignty” espoused by Stephen A. Douglas in 1854. Passage of Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 signaled to Lincoln a shift in public opinion that threatened the pursuit of justice for all, regardless of color. Lincoln began to address the natural rights of blacks in America in a way that returned white Americans to the ideals and practices of the Declaration of Independence as the surest means of preserving their own liberties. Given the tenuous hold that these principles had on white Americans, Lincoln was unwilling to adopt an abolitionist approach to pursuing the full protection of rights for blacks — an approach he believed would further entrench white prejudice against blacks and undermine the establishment of natural rights as the only legitimate basis of American self-government. The fragility of America as a union of freedom-loving people, despite the existence of slavery in several of the states, led Lincoln to go slow on protecting the rights of blacks, but also moved him to suggest what justice required in a way that he thought would appeal to both their self-interest and humanity |
