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Lincoln and the Abolitionists Essay

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LINCOLN AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

History records Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, yet ardent abolitionists of his day such as William Lloyd Garrison viewed him with deep suspicion. That the 16th president eventually achieved the abolitionists' most cherished dream, says biographer Allen Guelzo, happened through a curious combination of political maneuvering, personal conviction, and commitment to constitutional principle.
One of the ironies of the Civil War era and the end of slavery in the United States has always been that the man who played the role of the Great Emancipator was so hugely mistrusted and so energetically vilified by the party of abolition. Abraham Lincoln, whatever his larger reputation as the liberator of two …show more content…

I went to prominent Republicans, and among others, to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition, to give me the right to testify in a court of justice!... If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!
Lincoln's election did not mute abolitionist criticism. His unwillingness to use the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861 as a pretext for immediate abolition convinced William Lloyd Garrison that Lincoln was "unwittingly helping to prolong the war, and to render the result more and more doubtful! If he is 6 feet 4 inches high, he is only a dwarf in mind!" Garrison had never really believed that Lincoln's Republicans "had an issue with the South," and Lincoln himself did nothing once elected to convince him otherwise. Frederick Douglass, who had parted fellowship with Garrison over the issue of noninvolvement in politics, hoped for better from Lincoln, but only seemed to get more disappointments. Lincoln's presidential inaugural, with its promise not to interfere with southern slavery if the southern states attempted no violent withdrawal from the Union, left Douglass with "no very hopeful impression" of Lincoln. If anything, Lincoln had only confirmed Douglass's "worst fears," and he flayed Lincoln as "an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race

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