At the time there was likely hardly any white person who did not agree with this, including the abolitionists. Equality was not even an issue until after the war, and physical and intellectual equality was not an issue until well into the twentieth century.
The issue was the spread of human slavery, and then became the end of slavery where it existed.
Lincoln was properly concerned with his oath to ‘preserve and protect’ the Constitution, and this had become understood, after Andrew Jackson, to include preserving the federal union.
Forgot to mention that Jackson’s position was not a partisan position, see my new tagline, from the great spokesman for the Whigs.
Good post.
That’s why Frederick Douglass had to go around the country giving his speech: “That the Negro is a man.”
“At the time there was likely hardly any white person who did not agree with this, including the abolitionists.”
Thaddeus Stevens is an abolitionist who did. But he’s probably an exception in a lot of ways. Stevens was the leader of the Radical Republicans in the House and a far more radical man than the much more moderate Lincoln. In some writings Stevens appeared to advocate genocide for the people of the South.
Stevens was a bachelor who lived with a mixed race woman who was reputed to be his mistress. Stevens in his youth was rumored to have been responsible for the death of a young black woman. An odd character for sure.