“Forever Free”
Exhibition Script
Exhibition Text
Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln's Journey to Emancipation
Racial slavery, along with the lingering prejudice that slavery fostered, remains the central tragedy of American history. Slavery condemned millions of Americans to lives of bleak captivity. Slavery brought about a terrible civil war. Yet the American Revolution had dedicated the new republic to ideals of liberty and equality. How could it be that a nation founded on freedom was also home to one of the harshest labor systems the modern world has known? The exhibition "Forever Free" looks for answers in the progress of Abraham Lincoln towards a higher realization of America's ideals. Lincoln himself embodied the contradictions of the slaveholding republic. Lincoln hated slavery. Yet he was not an abolitionist who demanded immediate emancipation. The cautious moderate was transformed into the great emancipator only when he and his nation were recast in the fiery crucible of war.
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Section 1.
Young Lincoln's America
Background illustration: Henry Berckhoff, watercolor painting, “Homeward Bound. Hop’s Landing on Aquia Creek, May 3, 1863.” (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
I believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice
and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends
rather to increase than to abate its evils.— Abraham Lincoln, 1837
We are proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by
thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time,
the sole friends of Human Freedom.— Abraham Lincoln, 1854.
The American Revolution left a contradictory legacy of freedom and slavery. Most of the founding fathers thought slavery was wrong, but could envision no peaceful way to end it. They hoped that their descendants would somehow achieve gradual emancipation. Instead, as the United States grew, slavery flourished. No longer did slaveholders lament slavery as a "necessary evil." They began to celebrate it as a "positive good."
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This view from an abolitionist broadside drives home the dreadful contradiction: "The Land of the Free" was also the home of the slave.
Graphic:
"Reading the Declaration of Independence," from Slave Market of America, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
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Abolitionism
Beginning their campaign in about 1830, the abolitionists soon succeeded in dragging slavery out of shadows where white America had tried to hide it. Earlier opponents of slavery had proposed a gradual process of emancipation linked with plans to remove the freed blacks from America. The abolitionists, in contrast, demanded immediate, unconditional freedom. They also said that blacks deserved citizenship. Most white Americans hated abolitionists. In the North as well as the South, antislavery leaders were considered dangerous, unpatriotic fanatics out to destroy the Union. Whites also feared that racial equality would degrade them to the level of slaves.
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Most Northern whites opposed abolition. Prejudiced against blacks, many feared that emancipation would flood their states with freed slaves. The antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's own state. Like all aspiring politicians, Lincoln understood that a candidate linked to abolitionism had no chance of winning office.
Graphic:
"The mob attacking on the night of the 7th of November, 1837, at the time Lovejoy was murdered," from Henry Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy, Who was Killed by a Pro-Slavery Mob, Chicago, 1881. (Huntington Library)
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Frederick Douglass stands out as one of the most heroic figures in all American history. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1817, Douglass escaped to freedom. Self-educated, he won fame in the North as a powerful abolitionist writer and orator. Douglass avowed his creed in this note penned a few days after Lincoln's election:
"I am for Liberty, the Right of each man to own his own body and Soul. Whatever may be his Colour. Wherever he may be born. Whether of one Race or another. I am for Liberty now, and always—to the weak as well as the strong. I am for Liberty—universal liberty, wherever the haughty tyrant rears his head or the dejected Slave drags a Chain."
Graphics:
Frederick Douglass, autograph sentiment signed, November 10, 1860. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
Frederick Douglass, photograph. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
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Abolitionists flooded the North with antislavery literature. This little hand-colored book taught children their ABC's and the evils of slavery at the same time.
Graphic:
The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, Philadelphia, Printed for the Anti-Slavery Fair, 1847. (Huntington Library)
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The Defense of Slavery
As slavery came under increasing attack in the North, white Southerners grew more militant in the defense of the institution they saw as the cornerstone of their society. The Bible justified slavery, they said. Southern agriculture required the coerced labor of a race suited for work in hot climates. Blacks were better off as slaves in America than as free people in Africa—enslavement had given them the benefits of religion and civilization. And Southerners claimed that true equality among whites was possible only in a slave society.
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Bible-quoting slaveholders found "proof" that God wanted white Americans to enslave black Americans. But other students of the Scriptures drew different conclusions. The abolitionist crusade against slavery drew much of its passion from the revivalism then sweeping Christian communities across America.
Graphic:
Slavery a Moral institution, Sanctioned by the Scriptures... and the Preaching and Practice of the Saviour and His Apostles, By a Southern Farmer, Macon, Georgia, 1837. (Huntington Library)
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Slaveholders needed racism—the belief that the enslaved blacks were an inferior race. How else could they justify holding other people in bondage? As its title makes clear, this book advanced familiar proslavery, white supremacist arguments.
Graphic:
Negroes and Negro "Slavery": The First and Inferior Race; the Latter its Normal Condition, Baltimore, 1853. (Huntington Library)
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Slavery condemned generations of Americans to lives of unpaid labor, deprivation, and brutal punishment. Family was the slave community's greatest source of strength and comfort. But slaves had to live with the fear that their families might be broken up by sale.
Graphic:
Five generations of an enslaved family. Photograph made by Timothy O'Sullivan at the J.J. Smith plantation near Beaufort, S.C., 1862. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
Section 1. Young Lincoln's America
Timeline, 1619-1830
1619. First enslaved Africans arrive in British North American colonies at Jamestown, Virginia.
1675-1808. Period of greatest importation of Africans to enslavement in North America; succeeding generations of American slaves are native born.
1776. Americans declare independence from Britain. Slavery is legal in all states from New England to Georgia, but slave population is concentrated in the South.
1777-1804. Northern states abolish slavery.
1787. U.S. Constitution drafted, several clauses address issues of slavery.
1803. Louisiana Purchase expands U.S. New slave states will be created from territory.
1809. Abraham Lincoln born in Hardin County, Kentucky, a slave state.
1816. Lincoln family moves to Indiana, a free state.
1820. Missouri Compromise: Congress admits slave state of Missouri and free state of Maine. Slavery is banned in western territory north of a line at 36° 30' latitude.
1830. Abraham Lincoln moves to Illinois.
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Section 2.
The House Dividing
Background illustration: Henry Berckhoff, watercolor painting, “Railroad Guard near Brooks Station, February 1863.” (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government
cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.— Abraham Lincoln, 1858
I think the negro is included in the word "men" used in the Declaration of Independence.
I believe the declaration that "all men are created equal" is the great fundamental
principle upon which our free institutions rest.— Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Conflict over the spread of slavery into the western territories was the wedge that finally split the Union. Opposition to slavery's expansion was also the cause that carried an obscure Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln to the White House. An antislavery moderate, Lincoln had always hoped that slavery would slowly die away. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered his complacency. The Act opened vast new territories to slavery. People throughout the North reacted as Lincoln did—with outrage and new determination to resist the encroachments of the "Slave Power." The new Republican Party sprang up in the free states. The party's defining mission was the restriction of slavery.
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Abraham Lincoln and "the Right to Rise"
Slavery was a threat to the ideals Abraham Lincoln held most dear. Despite humble origins, the ambitious Lincoln had made himself a successful Illinois lawyer and politician. His brand of ambition was more than a desire for his own personal success. Getting ahead was also the principle that became the cornerstone of his political philosophy. He called it "the right to rise." For Abraham Lincoln, an equal chance to succeed was the great promise of America. He said that "I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition." Yet Lincoln was not an abolitionist who demanded immediate emancipation. He believed that a direct attack on Southern slavery would split the Union and end the American experiment in self-government. Confined to the South, slavery would have to die a natural death.
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The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Republican Abraham Lincoln challenged Democrat Stephen A. Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. To win reelection, all Senator Douglas had to do was convince enough voters that Lincoln was tainted by abolitionism. Anti-black prejudice in Illinois was strong enough to assure the defeat of any candidate seen as a friend to African-Americans. So Douglas relentlessly hammered away on the race issue. Lincoln fought back by stressing that slavery was "a vast moral evil." He declared his determination to keep slavery out of the western territories. But Lincoln also had to fend off his opponent's charges that he that he was a radical abolitionist who favored "negro equality."
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Abraham Lincoln had sadly concluded that American slavery would have to be eliminated gradually. But no one could ever persuade Lincoln that slavery was a "good thing." Here he has written that "although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself."
Graphic:
Abraham Lincoln, autograph manuscript, fragment on slavery and government,
c. 1857-1859. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
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Many believed that slavery could not survive if it was confined to the old South. Antislavery moderates like Abraham Lincoln would accept the continuation of slavery for many more years, just so long as isolating it in the South put it "on a course to ultimate extinction."
Graphic:
"Freedom and Slavery and the Coveted Territories," woodcut map in The Border Ruffian Code in Kansas, New York, New-York Tribune, 1856. (Huntington Library)
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Senator Stephen A. Douglas as he appeared at the time of the famous debates with Lincoln in 1858. Douglas was the frontrunner for the Democratic party presidential nomination in 1860. The challenger was little known outside of Illinois. Lincoln described the campaign as one "between the men who think slavery is wrong and those who do not think it is wrong."
Graphic:
Stephen A. Douglas. Photograph. (Huntington Library)
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The "House Divided" speech launched the astonishing ascent of Abraham Lincoln. In 1858, he was an Illinois lawyer little known beyond the borders of his state. Two years later, he was elected president. In the "House Divided" speech, Lincoln suggested that America had reached the final crisis. If slavery were allowed to spread into the West, it would soon become legal throughout the United States—even in the Northern free states.
Graphic:
Abraham Lincoln, autograph manuscript, early draft of the "House Divided" speech, c. 1858. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
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In the debates, Stephen Douglas said that Lincoln favored immediate abolition in the South and racial equality in the North. Not to refute such charges would be political suicide. Lincoln denied "all intention to bring about social and political equality between the white and black races." But he went on to affirm,
"I think the negro is included in the word `men' used in the Declaration of Independence—I believe the declaration that `all men are created equal' is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest."
Graphic:
Abraham Lincoln, autograph letter to James N. Brown, October 18, 1858. (Huntington Library)
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Democrats campaigned against Lincoln and the Republicans in 1858, 1860, and 1864, by branding them "Black Republicans" or radical abolitionists who wanted to destroy slavery and promote racial equality. This cartoon suggested that the Republicans tried unsuccessfully to hide their party's pro-black ideology.
Graphic:
"`The Nigger' in the Woodpile," New York, Currier & Ives, 1860. (Huntington Library)
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With the Democratic Party fatally split over slavery, Abraham Lincoln won election with just 39 percent of the popular vote and with no support in the South. Though determined to bar slavery from the West, Lincoln and his party had promised not to interfere with the South's "domestic
institutions." But white Southerners did not believe the promises.
Graphic:
"Hon. Abraham Lincoln, Born in Kentucky," Harper's Weekly, November 10, 1860.
Section 2. The House Dividing
Timeline, 1831-1860
1831. Beginning of the abolitionist movement: William Lloyd Garrison starts publishing The Liberator in Boston.
1831. Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia, Southern whites come together in the defense of slavery and white supremacy.
1837. When Illinois House of Representatives passes anti-abolitionist resolution, Lincoln and colleague enter protest stating that "the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy."
1847-1849. Lincoln serves single term in U.S. House of Representatives, the only national office he will hold before becoming president in 1861.
1854: The Kansas-Nebraska Act overturns ban on slavery in lands north of the 36° 30' line. Lincoln speaks out against expansion of slavery.
1858. Lincoln-Douglas Debates: Republican Party nominates Lincoln to challenge Democrat Stephen A. Douglas for U.S. Senate. Lincoln loses election, but establishes national reputation.