Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address

Context

By the time Lincoln was nominated for president in the spring of 1860, the issue of slavery had become a test of wills between the North and South. Abolitionists in the North were uncompromising, declaring slavery immoral. They agitated for immediate emancipation, or freeing, of slaves. Proslavery elements in the South not only defended their “peculiar institution” but also saw it as superior to the wage slavery of northern factories. In their view, slavery was a paternalistic institution, not the moral evil antislavery agitators deemed it. Between these extreme positions, many southerners and northerners looked for some way to preserve the Union that would not threaten the South but would limit the spread of slavery to the new territories in the West.

The new Republican Party, committed to opposing the spread of slavery, also sought ways to reach an accommodation with the South—although certain radicals in the party had ties to militant abolitionists, who rejected any compromise that would leave the institution of slavery intact. Passage on September 18, 1850, of the Fugitive Slave Act, a part of the Compromise of 1850 assuring the South that escaped slaves, when apprehended, would be returned to their owners, did little to appease southerners, even though Republicans such as Lincoln supported it. Like the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 attempted to strike a balance between free-soil and slave states, ensuring that as a slave state entered the Union, so, too, would a free-soil state.

But tensions arose in such territories as Kansas and Nebraska, where free-soil and slave-state advocates clashed. In May 1856, John Brown, a militant abolitionist, slaughtered five proslavery advocates in the Kansas-Nebraska territory. Brown later inflamed passions over the slavery issue when he attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 in an effort to foment a slave uprising that would ultimately overturn the institution of slavery itself. Although Brown's raid failed and he was executed, southerners concluded that sooner or later the federal government would enact measures that signaled the end of slavery.

In the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, Douglas propounded the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which meant that each state or territory could determine its position on slavery, which the federal government could not countermand. To Lincoln, however, providing this latitude destroyed the concept of a central government with nationally enforceable laws. But all he had to offer the South was the undertaking that under his administration the federal government would not hinder the already established institution of slavery.

In part, then, Lincoln was confronting a political crisis involving two sections of a nation striving to maintain their place in the balance of power. He presumed that as long as the federal government enacted no laws that interfered with the right to own slaves in the southern states, extremist calls for secession would ultimately dissipate through the kinds of compromises that had been formulated in 1820 and 1850. Unfortunately, Lincoln miscalculated, for he failed to see that the argument over slavery was, in the minds of many southerners, an issue striking directly at their own liberties and way of life. They viewed the Union as an organization of sovereign states that had the right to secede. Lincoln, on the other hand, interpreted the U.S. Constitution as implicitly forming a Union that could not be dissolved. As he put it in his First Inaugural Address, what government has ever stipulated that process by which it can be destroyed? Denying, then, this fundamental right to secede, Lincoln's efforts to reconcile with the South proved, in retrospect, to be of no avail.