APRIL 4, 1864:
President
Abraham Lincoln had been corresponding with three Kentuckians, Governor Thomas
E. Bramlette, (who had protested the recruiting of black regiments in Kentucky),
Albert Hodges, and former Senator Archibald Dixon. Today he responded to
comments by Hodges, who was the editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth, regarding his position on Emancipation:
Executive Mansion,
Washington, April 4,
1864.
A.G. Hodges, Esq
Frankfort, Ky.
My dear Sir:
You ask me to put in
writing the substance of what I verbally said the other day, in your presence,
to Governor Bramlette and Senator Dixon. It was about as follows:
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery
is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and
feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an
unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in
the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office
without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get
power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in
ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge
my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly
declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I
have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling
on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution
to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every
indispensabale means, that government -- that nation -- of which that
constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet
preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet
often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given
to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become
lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution,
through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground,
and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even
tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I
should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.
When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade
it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When a little
later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks,
I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still
later, Gen. Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because
I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and
May, and July 1862 I made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states
to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for
military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that
measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven
to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the
Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the
latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was
not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in
our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white
military force, -- no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it
shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and
laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no
cavilling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.
"And now let any Union man who complains
of the measure, test himself by writing down in one line that he is for
subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking
these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them
where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his
case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth."
I add a word which was not in the verbal
conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity.
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have
controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition
is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim
it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great
wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall
pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find
therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.
Yours truly,
A. Lincoln
