No more skillful move is recorded in the
history of our parties and partisans than this act of Mr. Lincoln, by
which he disarmed his Anti-Slavery critics without giving them any
material advantage or changing the actual situation. I am not now
speaking of the motive underlying the proclamation of the President,
but of its effect. Without it he could not have been renominated and
re-elected.
Another observation, in order to be entirely just to Mr. Lincoln,
after what has been stated, would at this point seem to be called for.
There is no doubt that from the first he was at heart an Anti-Slavery
man, which is saying a good deal for one born in Kentucky, raised in
southern Indiana and southern Illinois, and who was naturally of a
conservative turn of mind. Nevertheless, he was never an Abolitionist.
He was opposed to immediate--what he called "sudden"--emancipation. He
recognized the "right"--his own word--of the slave-owner to his pound
of flesh, either in the person of his bondman or a cash equivalent. He
was strongly prejudiced against the negro. Of that fact we have the
evidence in his colonization ideas. He favored the banishment of our
American-born black people from their native land.
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