A History of the American People

That Lincoln, as his wife implied, had a huge will when intellectually roused to a moral cause
is clear. This sprang from a compulsive sense of duty rather than ambition as such. The evidence
suggests that he was obliged to reenter politics not because he was an anti-slavery campaigner
but because, in the second half of the 1850s, the slavery issue came to dominate American
politics to the exclusion of almost everything else. Each time the issue was raised, and Lincoln
was obliged to ponder it, the more convinced he became that the United States was uniquely
threatened by the evil, and its political consequences. In those circumstances, an American who
felt he had powers-and Lincoln was conscious of great powers-had an inescapable duty to use
them in the Union's defense. Lincoln did not see slavery in religious terms, as the organic sin' of the Union, as the Protestant campaigners of the North put it. Those close to him agreed he had no religious beliefs in the conventional sense. His wife said:Mr Lincoln had no faith and no hope
in the usual acceptation of those words. He never joined a church. But still, I believe, he was a
religious man by nature ... it was a kind of poetry in his nature.' Herndon said Lincoln insisted no
personal God existed and when he used the word God he meant providence: he believed in
predestination and inevitability.'
Lincoln came closer to belief in God, as we shall see, but in the 1850s he was opposed to
slavery primarily on humanitarian grounds, as an affront to man's natural dignity; and this could
be caused by religious sectarians as well as by slave-owners. In his boyish and youthful reading,
he had conceived great hopes of the United States, which he now feared for. He wrote: Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read of "all men are created equal except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control it will be "all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigration to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.'" The state of America caused him anguish. He said to Herndon:How hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one
had never lived for it! The world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death-struggle. One made
known by a universal cry, what is to be done? Is anything to be done? Who can do anything?
And how is it to be done? Do you never think of these things?'
But from this general sense of downward moral plunging, which had to be arrested, the
slavery issue, and still more the South's determination to extend and fortify it, loomed ever
larger. In an important letter to Joshua F. Speed, the storekeeper with whom he shared some of
his most intimate thoughts, Lincoln dismissed the claim that slavery was the South's affair and
Northerners had no interest' in the matter. There were, he said, many parts of the North, in Ohio for instance,where you cannot avoid seeing such sights as slaves in chains, being carried to
miserable destinations, and the heart is wrung. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no
interest in a thing which has and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.'
Lincoln was as much concerned for the slave-owner as for the slave-the institution morally
destroyed the man supposed to benefit from it. It was thus more important, as Lincoln saw it, to
end slave-owning than to end slavery itself. He said a Kentuckian had once told him: `You might
have any amount of land, money in your pocket, or bank stock, and while traveling around
nobody would be any the wiser. But if you have a darky trudging at your heels, everybody would
see him and know you owned a slave. It is the most glittering property in the world. If a young
man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he, or she, owns. Slave-ownership
betokens not only the possession of wealth but indicates the gentleman of leisure, who is above
labor and scorns it.' This image of the strutting slave-owner, corrupted and destroyed by the