abraham lincoln speech slavery

Abraham Lincoln First Inaugural Address Annotated

Man-Citizens of the United States:
In compliance with a particularly as old as the Government itself, I appear before you to address you quickly and to take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the Joint States to be taken by the President before he enters on the mastery of this office."

I do not consider it necessary at offer for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no loyal anxiety or excitement.

Apprehension seems to happen among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Superintendence their property and their peace and personal gage are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most thorough evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been unspoken for to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but bring up from one of those speeches when I declare that - I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to impede with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I assume trust to I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Those who nominated and elected me did so with full insight that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the dais for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic explication which I now read:

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and specially the right of each State to order and knob its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is vital to that balance of power on which the perfection and tenacity of our political fabric depend; and we implicate the lawless invasion by armed constraint of the soil of any State or Territory, no dilemma what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

I now harp on these sentiments, and in doing so I only press upon the overt attention the most conclusive evidence of which the the truth is susceptible that the property, peace, and confidence of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now arriving Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be understood will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever induce--as cheerfully to one section as to another.

There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from usefulness or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:

No living soul held to service or labor in one State of affairs, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or fixing therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on request of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

It is under no circumstances questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of what we call refugee slaves; and the intention of the lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress renounce their support to the whole Constitution--to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases turn out within the terms of this clause "shall be delivered up" their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would change the effort in good temper, could they not with closely equal unanimity frame and dated a law by means of which to keep good that unanimous malediction?

There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by inhabitant or by State authority, but surely that balance is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but only slightly consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be pleasure that his oath shall go unkept on a basically unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?

Again: In any law upon this liable to suffer ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a set at liberty man be not in any case surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well at the same just the same from time to time to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarantees that "the citizens of each Hold shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States"?

I take the solemn oath to-day with no mental reservations and with no plan to construe the Constitution or laws by any hypercritical rules; and while I do not judge now to specify particular acts of Congress as apt to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in accepted and private stations, to conform to and hold to by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to debauch any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our Popular Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly noteworthy citizens have in succession administered the number one branch of the Government. They have conducted it through many perils, and as a rule with great success. Yet, with all this scope of pattern, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional incumbency of four years under great and peculiar obstacle. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

(NOTE: Underscoring added to the following paragraph. Mr. Lincoln’s definition was so completely at odds with the understanding of the civil establishment of his day, and of the Founding Fathers, that one can only advised this as a liar boldly asserting a lie as a guise for a wrongful action, and then defying anyone to call him a perjurer. Every one of the Founding Fathers, and every Constitutional pedagogue, credible Supreme Court Objectivity, and common citizen understood that the Constitution of the Allying was in no way intended to be perpetual. Unlike the Articles of Confederacy, which it replaced, it intentionally contained no phraseology that expressed any intention that a perpetual amalgamating was intended or contemplated by any of the Sovereign States that ratified it. In information, some of those States expressly included speech in their ordinances of ratification that clearly stated that they were reserving the -karat to withdraw from the Union whenever they determined that it was in the finest interest of their citizens to so do.)

I hold that in contemplation of limitless law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is unfailing. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the vital law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no direction proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own ceasing. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our Popular Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being preposterous to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the thingumabob itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government special, but an association of States in the nature of catch merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One function to a contract may violate it--break it, so to utter--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

(NOTE: Mr. Lincoln’s row in the paragraph above is another outright lie. As a highly paid advocate for the Illinois Central Railroad and other influentially prosperous corporations and private clients, he well knew that parties to contracts may void from those contracts for any of a variety of reasons – in the occurrence of the Constitution of the United States, it was starkly intended that any and all States could withdraw whenever they constant that the Federal government had breached the settlement by its actions, or failure to act, or at any time that the National determined that continued participation in the Federal Joining was counter to its interests and/or the interests of the citizens of that Style.)

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in authorized contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the narrative of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in accomplishment, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Affirmation of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the fealty of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and employed that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And in the long run, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to built a more perfect Union."

But if destruction of the Graft by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Fusing is less perfect than before the Constitution, having dead the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no Structure upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Ring; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally disannul, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the power of the United States are insurrectionary or creative, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in in consideration of of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the territory of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself directly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a uncluttered duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as doable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall deduct the requisite means or in some authoritative decorum direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a frighten, but only as the...

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Lincoln-Douglas Debate: The Question of Slavery

abraham lincoln speech slavery: Lincoln speaks of the difference between the Democrats and Republicans on slavery. Michael Krebs portrays Abraham Lincoln in reenactment at the lone surviving Lincoln-Douglas Debate site.

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