Lincoln And The Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln and Emancipation

He comes to us in the mists of legend as a kind of homespun Socrates, brimming with prairie wit and folk wisdom. There is a counter legend of Lincoln, one shared ironically enough by many white Southerners and certain black Americans of our time. Neither of these views, of course, reveals much about the man who really lived--legend and political interpretations seldom do. As a man, Lincoln was complex, many-sided, and richly human. He was an intense, brooding person, he was plagued with chronic depression most of his life. At the time he even doubted his ability to please or even care about his wife. Lincoln remained a moody, melancholy man, given to long introspection about things like death and mortality. Preoccupied with death, he was also afraid to insanity. Lincoln was a teetotaler because liquor left him "flabby and undone", blurring his mind and threatening his self-control. One side of Lincoln was always Supremely logical and analytical; he was intrigued by the clarity of mathematics. As a self-made man, Lincoln felt embarrassed about his log-cabin origins and never liked to talk about them. By the 1850s, Lincoln was one of the most sought after attorney in Illinois, with a reputation as a lawyer's lawyer. Though a man of status and influence, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in legend. Politically, Lincoln was always a nationalist in outlook, an outlook that began when he was an Indiana farm boy tilling his farther mundane wheat field. Lincoln always maintained that he had always hated human bondage, as much as any abolitionist. He realized how wrong it was that slavery should exist at all in a self-proclaimed free Republic. He opposed slavery, too, because he had witnessed some of its evils firsthand. What could be done? So went Lincoln's argument before 1854. To solve the ensuing problem of racial adjustment, Lincoln insisted that the federal government should colonize all blacks in Africa, an idea he got from his political idol, Whig national leader Henry Clay. Then came 1854 and the momentous Kansas-Nebraska Act, brainchild of Lincoln's archrival Stephen A. Douglas. At once a storm of free-soil protest broke across the North, and scores of political leaders branded the Kansas-Nebraska Act as part of a sinister Southern plot to extend slavery and augment Southern political power in Washington. The train of ominous events from Kansas-Nebraska to Dred Scott shook Lincoln to his foundations.