So?
"Well I too, go for saving the Union. Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any GREAT evil, to avoid a GREATER one. But when I go to Union saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ has some adaptation to the end."
"Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not in the blood of the revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity." Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize it. Let north and south -- let all Americans -- let all lovers of liberty everywhere -- join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations."
And:
"Mr. Clay many, many years ago . . . told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunoered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us. ...I call attention to the fact that in a preeminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work: blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man, but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of Ohio Republicans, or Democrats , . . that there is now going or among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject.
This government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of slavery impairs the general welfare. . . , I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive-slave law, because the Constitution requires us as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the out spreading of the institution. . . . We must prevent the revival of the Africa slave-trade, and the enacting by Congress ot a territorial slave code. We must prevent each of these things being done by either Congress or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right. . . . Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fear- lessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we' are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care, such as the Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did."
Walt
So, to what did Lincoln refer, in comparison to the institution of slavery, as a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself?
Lincoln clearly says something is a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.
What was that something, in Lincoln's mind, that was a greater evil than the institution of slavery?