Summary Of President Abraham Lincoln And The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

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President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March of 1861. He hopped into the presidency at a very rough time for the Unites States. Slavery was the main cause and this turned over to states succeeding from the union. When Lincoln was fighting for presidency he promised the republican party many things and even agreed against the complete abolition of slavery. However, the war was not an easy fight and Lincoln changed his decisions and views along the way about slavery. He started with freeing the slaves and relocating them back to Africa, then used abolition as a threat to the south and then finally came to the realization that all men should be free regardless of color. It took major turning points in the war for this to occur but it happened …show more content…

He ran against Stephen Douglas and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the most famous political debates to this day. Douglas was not for the abolition of slavery; he believed that the government should not “regulate the relations between master and servant.” (Fiero 392) This brought in a good number of votes for him but didn’t agree with the majority of people in the north. Lincoln went with the honest route. Lincoln was for the abolition of slavery and as a compromise he talked about relocating them back to Africa. He wanted all men to have their unalienable rights but still felt they were not as good as whites. Lincoln “opposed giving Illinois blacks the right to vote or serve on juries and spoke frequently of colonizing blacks overseas as the best solution to the problems of slavery and race.” (Fiero 391) This won him the presidency but caused some big chain …show more content…

The northern people needed a response and Abraham says “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” Now Lincoln was for all humans in the United States to be free and not worrying about relocation or the south coming back to the union. He knew the war had to happen and that “to win the war, therefore, the Union must make the institution that lay at the economic and social foundation of southern life a military target.” (Fiero 408) In Ken Burns: The Civil War- Forever Free-1862 when Lincoln visits the battlefield to see the troops and talk with the commander McClellan. The men said “They could see the deep sadness in the presidents face, and feel the burden on his heart, thinking of is great commission to save this people, and knowing that he could do this no otherwise than as he had been doing. By and through the manliness of these men.” (Burns) Later after this he decided to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, which didn’t set all slaves free yet but gave them a date in which slavery will be abolished. “Not only did the Emancipation Proclamation alter the nature of the Civil War and the course of American history, but it also marked a turning point in Lincoln’s own thinking. For the first time, it committed the government to enlisting black soldiers in the

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