Neither Lincoln nor any of the leadership of the Republican Party prior to 1861 truly desired to rid the Union of slavery. Republicans, while opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories, were constrained by their view of the Constitution as a document that protected slavery within individual states.
During Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, he emphatically declared:
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Lincoln, now known as The Great Emancipator, made his position clear that slavery is legal, constitutional, and cannot be interfered with by the federal government. He supported that these ideas be "made express and irrevocable," through the ratification of an amendment to the constitution.1
Despite this, it is often thought that Lincoln was truly an abolitionist who had only made these statements with the intent of preserving the Union. However, neither Lincoln nor any of the leadership of the Republican Party prior to 1861 truly desired to rid the Union of slavery. Republicans, while opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories, were constrained by their view of the Constitution as a document that protected slavery within individuals states. The Republican Party, as a coalition of multiple anti-slavery forces, took an explicitly moderate position: slavery will die a natural death as long as its further expansion is prevented.2 This view was not a compromise in the wake of secession, but rather the prevailing belief of members of the party even before the threat of war.
"Slavery will die a natural death as long as its further expansion is prevented."
The Republican Party's prevailing position before the Civil WarIn the early 1830s, most anti-slavery advocates were of the opinion that slavery was constitutional, and sought to eliminate slavery exclusively through political action.3 The 1833 Declaration of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the leading abolitionist group at the time, states:
We concede that congress, under the present national compact, has no right to interfere with any of the slave states in relation to this momentous subject.4
But by 1839, a schism formed within the AA-SS. A faction of the society, led by Alvan Stewart, broke off to become the Liberty Party. They desired to pursue political action through electoral results and had a radical theory of constitutionalism.5 The party held that the constitution was in essence an anti-slavery document. While they did acknowledge the four constitutional provisions allowing for slavery, they contended that the 5th Amendment's Due Process Clause superseded those, giving Congress the power to eradicate slavery within all states.6
In the New Jersey Slave Case of 1845, Stewart cited the 5th Amendment along with four other legal principles to justify that slavery is prohibited under the United States Constitution and laws. First, he argued, in accordance with the Somerset Doctrine established by English Common Law, that slavery was so odious that it violated natural rights, and that natural rights supersede statutes. Second, he argued that slavery was antithetical to "a Republican form of Government" established by the Guarantee Clause. Third, slavery "contravened 'the very idea of a Constitution of the United States as embodied in the preamble.'" Finally, Stewart argued that the Treaty of Ghent pledged that the United States and Great Britain would end "the traffic of slaves," therefore the State of New Jersey must overturn slavery in accordance with this treaty.7
These arguments were not as successful as Stewart and the Liberty Party had hoped. The Court decided to uphold Black Apprenticeships in New Jersey, halting the anti-slavery conception of the Constitution.8
Believed slavery was constitutional; sought to eliminate it exclusively through political action. Held that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the slave states.
Broke from AA-SS to pursue electoral politics. Held the Constitution was fundamentally anti-slavery: the 5th Amendment's Due Process Clause superseded the four provisions accommodating slavery.
Maintained the Constitution was "a pro-slavery compact" and burned copies of it. Any participation in the American political system, even voting, was "responsible for the sin of slavery."
By 1840, the faction that came to dominate the AA-AS was that of William Lloyd Garrison. His followers, called Garrisonians, maintained that the Constitution was "a pro-slavery compact," and therefore the appropriate response was to denounce it. Garrisonians argued that supporting the Constitution was tantamount to an "agreement with hell."9
The Garrisonians burned copies of the Constitution and distanced themselves from the American Political System. Wendell Phillips, an ardent supporter of Garrison, wrote that anyone who participated in the American political system by voting or holding office was "responsible for the sin of slavery." The Garrisonians viewed the entire system as tainted and biased towards the Slave Power. Therefore, any involvement in politics, even the support of anti-slavery laws (such as one that would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia), was a fruitless effort.10
The schism between Garrisonians and other anti-slavery factions reflects a deeper divide that Omri Boehm, in his Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (2025), identifies as the central fault line of antebellum American politics. Boehm draws a sharp distinction between those who looked to the Constitution as the ultimate authority on questions of slavery and those who held the Declaration of Independence to be the foundational text. As Boehm writes, "the abolitionists' central text was not a legal document like the Constitution, which Garrison described as a 'covenant with death and an agreement with hell,' but the Declaration of Independence." Where the Constitution protected the property rights of slave owners, the Declaration asserted, as a self-evident truth, that all men are created equal, a proposition that the abolitionists understood to carry a categorical moral authority that no constitution could override.11 The Republican Party, as the following section demonstrates, fell decisively on the constitutional side of this divide.
As the chasm between Northern and Southern political views widened due to the conflict over Kansas, the Republican Party emerged as the principal party in the North. The Party was a coalition of Abolitionists, Free Soilers, Know Nothings, Libertymen, and even some Whigs and Democrats. Therefore, the party took a decidedly moderate approach with regard to the constitutionality of slavery.12
The first Republican Party platform is startlingly silent on multiple issues. The 1856 document mentions that Kansas should be admitted as a free-state and that the Congress should not establish slavery in the territories, however it did not mention issues that were more contended within the party, such as the Fugitive Slave Act or the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.13 Although the Republican Party Platform did not specify their position of Constitutional interpretation with regard to slavery, Republicans were careful to clarify that they thought that the regulation of slavery was outside the powers of the Federal Government. Leading Republican Senator Henry Wilson stated there is "no power under the Constitution to interfere with slavery in the States."14
Republicans had to walk a tightrope between promoting a Big Tent approach and preserving a moderate platform. The Republican Party was ostensibly non-radical, but many Abolitionists still joined its ranks. Frederick Douglass, an Abolitionist who held that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document, was one of the founders of the Republican Party. He viewed the party as a pragmatic means to institute policies that would gradually lead to abolition, even though he was dissatisfied by the tendency of Republicans to avoid blanket condemnations of slavery. Douglass said:
We are sorry that the hosts of freedom could not have been led forth upon a higher platform, and had inscribed upon their banners, 'Death to Slavery,' instead of 'No More Slave States.' But... in the absence of all hope of rearing up the standard of such a party for the coming campaign, we can but desire the success of the Republican candidates.15
Other radical abolitionists also expressed support for the Republican party. William Lloyd Garrison, despite his view that the Republican party was blemished by its support for the Constitution, still stated "If I had a million of votes, I would give them all to Frémont [Republican Presidential Nominee of 1856]."16
Meanwhile, the leaders of the party intentionally distanced themselves from Abolitionist sentiment in order to have a wider political appeal. Many Republicans publicly scorned abolitionism and rejected the claim of being "the friend of the slave."17
In the Republican Convention of 1860, Republicans needed to propose a moderate candidate who could carry the states in the lower North that the party had failed to capture in 1856. William Seward, the supposed front-runner, was often considered a political radical prone to indiscretion. Furthermore, he was very publicly anti-nativist, which alienated the Know Nothing element of the Republican Party.18
Therefore, Abraham Lincoln received the nomination instead of him. Lincoln was a moderate in his views; he did not take issue with the Fugitive Slave Act as long as the Fugitive Slaves had a right to a fair trial, and he actively distanced himself from Abolitionism.19 After John Brown's famed attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Lincoln declared "John Brown was no Republican," and that one "could not implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise."20
Most importantly, Lincoln viewed the Constitution as a document that protected slavery in the states where it existed. In a speech in 1859, Lincoln succinctly summarized his position:
I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union... I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists, because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so.21
This deference to the Constitution over moral principle is precisely what Boehm identifies as the defining feature of Lincoln's politics. Boehm argues that the fundamental disagreement of the era was not the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates but rather the unspoken one between Lincoln and John Brown. As Boehm writes, "the deeper dispute about the Declaration of Independence was not the highly commercialized intellectual duel between Lincoln and Douglas but the unspoken one between Lincoln and Brown. The two men easily agreed in 'thinking slavery wrong'... The harder challenge concerns the authority of this universalist proposition: Does it carry an uncompromising categorical validity, capable of overriding the authority of unjust laws and norms? Brown answered that question affirmatively in contrast to Lincoln, who, on this question, agreed with Douglas."22 For Brown, and for the abolitionist tradition more broadly, the Declaration's assertion that all men are created equal was not merely a political aspiration. It was the authoritative text, and the Constitution's protection of slavery was, by that measure, illegitimate from the start. For Lincoln, the Constitution remained the binding authority, and the Declaration's truths, however self-evident, could not override it.
The moderate constitutionalist approach became harder to defend once the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford. The majority determined that slaveholders had a right to hold slaves even in the territories. Republicans had the choice to either honor the decision, thereby legitimizing slavery, or refuse to respect it, thereby disputing Judicial Sovereignty. Often their response lay in between the two: respecting part of the decision while discounting the part that expanded slavery to the territories. Some considered that once Chief Justice Roger Taney stated that Scott was not a citizen, the rest of his opinion was superfluous, and therefore, obiter dictum. Others viewed the case as a conspiracy of the Slave Power, and alleged that President Buchanan had colluded with the Chief Justice.23
Lincoln opined that the decision was "based upon a mistaken statement of fact," claiming that the constitution does not affirm the right to own slaves, as the word "property" is not used in any of the four sections alluding to slavery.24
Notably, it was Taney's Dred Scott opinion that first introduced into constitutional law the argument that the Declaration's "all men" did not include Black people, an argument that, as Boehm points out, Lincoln himself recognized as a relatively recent development. Lincoln "repeatedly complained that, before Dred Scott, there had never been a man 'in the whole world who said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term 'all men'' but, after the decision, 'it has become the catchword of the entire [Democratic] party.'"25 The proslavery forces thus needed to neutralize the Declaration in order to protect the Constitution's accommodation of slavery. Lincoln's response, to challenge the decision on technical constitutional grounds rather than to assert the Declaration's authority over the Court, reveals again the extent to which his politics were anchored to the rule of law even when that law protected an institution he acknowledged to be morally wrong.
In the months following Lincoln's election, the Southern states began to secede, forming the Confederate States of America. The Southern States had the inaccurate conception that Lincoln and "Black Republicans" planned to initiate slave insurrections and overturn the Southern way of life. Secession was viewed as the remedy in which the South could preserve their social institutions. Meanwhile, Northerners did not take the threat seriously, thinking that "secessionists could not claim to speak for the entire South, nor could they sustain an independent Southern nation. They would not dare to fight the North without support from the Upper South, and in the end they would back down."26
In these intermediate months, multiple plans for reconciliation were proposed. The first of these was the Crittenden Compromise. It suggested that Slavery will be prohibited north of the 36°30′ parallel, and permitted south of it. However, Republicans rejected this proposal because it would have allowed for the expansion of slavery into new territories if those territories were located in the South. In February of 1861, Congressmen organized a Peace Convention to propose a compromise. However, every proposal that came from it was considered to yield too much to slavery, and therefore, they were rejected by most Republicans.27
Simultaneously, a committee of 33 Representatives (one from each state) was formed to draft an "explanatory amendment" at the request of outgoing President James Buchanan. Buchanan requested that the amendment address "(1) express recognition of the right of property in slaves, (2) protection of this right in the common territories, and (3) recognition of the right of masters to obtain their runaway slaves."28 Speaker William Pennington chose Republican Representative Thomas Corwin, a Unionist and Anti-Abolitionist, as Chairman of the new committee.
No amendment of this Constitution having for its object any interference within the States with the relation between their citizens and those described in section second of the first article of the Constitution as 'all other persons,' shall originate with any state that does not recognize the relation within its own limits, or shall be valid without the assent of every one of the States composing the Union.
The Senate formed a similar committee consisting of 13 members. There, a nearly identical amendment was proposed by William Seward.29
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress any power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
Abraham Lincoln's fingerprints can be found all over this proposal. On December 20th, four days before Seward returned to Congress, prominent Republican Thurlow Weed passed Seward a letter from Lincoln which stated:
The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution ought to be enforced by a law of Congress, with efficient provisions for that object, not obligating private persons to assist in its execution, but punishing all who resist it, and with the usual safeguards to liberty, securing freemen against being surrendered as slaves ... That all state laws, if there be such, really, or apparently, in conflict with such law of Congress, ought to be repealed; and no opposition to the execution of such law of Congress ought to be made .... That the Federal Union must be preserved.30
Clearly, Seward's final proposal differed from Lincoln's request. However, the Corwin Amendment retained Lincoln's support. In March of 1861, Lincoln sent an identical letter to the Governor of each state, containing "an authenticated copy of a Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States."31
Two months after Seward's introduction of his resolution in the Senate, Corwin brought the Amendment to a vote, not using his own text, but Seward's.32 This vote was a source of contention among House Republicans. The more radical wing of the Republican Party, including members such as Thaddeus Stevens and Owen Lovejoy, opposed the amendment on the grounds that the Union should not make concessions to the Secessionist South. Even so, both Representatives "specifically disavowed any attack on slavery in the slave states. They deplored slavery and hoped to see it ended, but they understood the Constitution to mean that white Southerners could continue to keep slaves in the states where slavery was established."33
More moderate Republicans, such as Benjamin Junkin, were supportive of the Amendment. Junkin noted that the Republican Party platform of 1860 opposed federal interference with slavery in the states. Therefore, he concluded that "If it is a good thing in a platform, it will be a good thing in the Constitution."34 That even the amendment's opponents shared this constitutional premise is significant: there was no faction of the Republican Party prepared to challenge the legality of slavery in the states on moral grounds alone.
The House of Representatives adopted the Amendment with a vote of 133–65 (it needed 132), and the Senate adopted it three days later with a vote of 24–12 (it needed exactly 24). The Amendment was then sent out to the states for ratification, and if not for the Civil War, most likely would have become part of the Constitution. On the constitutional logic that Lincoln and the Republican Party had consistently applied, there was no legal mechanism left to challenge it.
The fact that many Republicans, including President Lincoln, supported a Constitutional Amendment that proposed to immortalize the institution of slavery is at odds with our general perception of history. It is easier to view history as a simple narrative in which slavery was always contrary to American Values, and Lincoln's Republican Party came to power in order to rid society of this stain. But as attractive as this story may be, it is a complete fiction.
We view the injustice of slavery as anathema to the principles of democracy, but in the 19th century, a democracy that disenfranchised millions was no contradiction. The near universally held view across the United States was that slavery must be tolerated to preserve democracy.
Republicans placed the legal authority of the Constitution above the moral authority of the Declaration. The central question was whether "all men are created equal" carried a categorical authority greater than the interests of preserving the Union or the rule of law. Republicans answered that it did not. On that basis, there was no internal contradiction in condemning slavery as wrong while voting to protect it permanently. Without the war, and the pressure it put on Lincoln to appeal to universal principles, the Amendment would likely have been ratified. Under a view that democracy itself is an object to be defended, the US could have enshrined slavery forever. Under the view that democracy is the most useful tool to preserve moral principles, slavery was ended.