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Lincoln really didn’t care about slavery one way or the other - he stated so - until he realized he could use it for political gain. He supported the original 13th amendment - The Corwin amendment.

11 posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 11:47:11 AM by Davy Buck

The US had legalized slavery for over 200 years, north and south. Lincoln advocated an amendment that would have made slavery permanent and irrevocable.....

25 posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 10:57:15 PM by 4CJ

Lincoln's support of the Corwin Amendment has to be viewed in the light of his other activities undertaken at the same time which were not public knowledge: His interference, in Dec. 1860, a month after the election with Gen. Winfield Scott behind Pres. Buchanan's back and Scott's subsequent strong support, in meetings with Buchanan and his cabinet officers, of keeping federal garrisons in the Southern forts, for example. Item, Lincoln (in January, 1861, two months before his inauguration) interceded with the governor of Illinois to arm Missouri Wideawakes -- Lincolnite partisans and thereafter political troops, and legally a private army -- from the stocks of the Illinois Militia. The Wideawakes, under U.S. Army Col. Nathaniel Lyons, confronted and disarmed the Missouri Militia Volunteers (MMV) and overthrew the elected government of the State of Missouri.

Occam's Razor invites us to decide, as a practical matter, whether Lincoln's public support of the Corwin Amendment was a sincerely made offer in the interest of public peace, or whether it was a necessary political imposture to deal with attempts to prevent war between the remaining and the departing States. The measures Lincoln took in secret must, I think, betoken the more sincerely held motives, by Occam, and their divergence from the purposes of the Corwin Amendment and its other sponsors must throw the greatest suspicion on Lincoln's support of Corwin and other measures for peace.

Lincoln had struggled in 1855 with the constitutional and legal impediments to eliminating slavery, as he told his correspondents at the time, and he had discovered no legal way to accomplish abolition. What remains, then, is to realize that as early as 1855, Lincoln had settled on war as the only solution that would allow an abolitionist champion to impose emancipation on the resistant planter class of the South. As that is precisely what, in the event, transpired at a cost of a million lives, then Occam invites us to accept that war was indeed Lincoln's policy from the outset, and that the Civil War was his means to his end, and that he meant to frustrate Corwin from the first, and to dissemble his genuine, grimmer intentions, which the public would never have supported had they known.

Further to my last, perhaps the "champion of emancipation" was the real text of Lincoln's 1856 "missing speech" to the Republican convention, and the real reason for the Republicans' otherwise quizzical nomination of Gen. John Fremont, a career military man of no known political connections otherwise, for President.

Fremont's failed candidacy in 1856 may have convinced Lincoln and his closest friends that thereafter Lincoln would have to do it himself.

If this is what actually happened, then a whole correspondence about the Republican campaign of 1856 remains to be discovered, examined or reexamined, and integrated.

The implication here is that, from the beginning, the Republican Party was a political crusade undertaken on a platform that included a secret war plank.