Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

On April 18, 1864, a year after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln spoke in Baltimore. In the speech Lincoln commented on the divergent definitions of liberty running through the nation: “we all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing” (43). Some believed liberty was freedom from slavery, others the freedom to own slaves. Historians of America contemporary to Lincoln predominantly identified liberty as freedom from oppressive government, or as civil liberty. This aligned with the United States’s history of rejecting monarchic rule in the initial revolution that founded the nation.

Civil liberties are an important part of the US Constitution, as is the notion that all men are created equal. But this ideal was not being lived in the American South. There, economic and cultural functions depended on slavery: “Black slavery [… became] the necessary basis of white liberty” (50). Southern political leaders like James Hammond and John Calhoun saw the right to own property, and therefore slaves, as part of their constitutionally granted liberties. They believed equality among men in the eyes of the law was exclusively between white men.

Lincoln saw slavery as the main obstacle to true liberty and the success of the

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