On Lincoln and the Enduring Struggle for Racial Justice
By the time Abraham Lincoln arrived in my home town of Alton, Illinois to wrap up the grueling 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas his position on slavery had become clearer. Alton was a town in the middle of the north-south divide and the slavery debate. Elijah P. Lovejoy, the outspoken abolitionist newspaperman, had been murdered there in 1837 by a racist mob. Like much of Illinois the city harbored outspoken proponents on both sides of the growing conflict.
Fittingly, the last Lincoln-Douglas debate revealed Lincoln’s own middle position: slaves were indeed fully human and thereby had natural rights to so live; slaves were not, however, to be accorded civil rights that would permit them to live in equal citizenship with whites. Lincoln’s driving objective was to save the Union, nothing less and little more. Read more
Categories
Authors