One of the major misconceptions about Abraham Lincoln is that he ran for president with the full intent of ending slavery in the United States. It’s nice to think that it was once possible for someone with so much moral sense and the courage of his convictions to get elected to, well, anything. But the true story of Lincoln’s evolving feelings about slavery and racial equality, chronicled in “Lincoln’s Undying Words,” a new exhibition opening at the Chicago History Museum on Saturday, is far more complicated, and also far more interesting.
The first of those speeches was his stump speech when he was running for senator of Illinois, in which he famously declared “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and accused his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, of conspiring to make the United States an entirely slaveholding nation. “It’s very much a political campaign speech,” Mahoney says. “There are no moral issues.”
Then there are no more speeches until the Gettysburg Address in 1863. (Which, by the way, says Mahoney, was not written on the back of an envelope.) By then, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that freed all the slaves in the Confederacy. (Strangely, because border states were still part of the Union, slavery wouldn’t be abolished there until after the war.) Although the Gettysburg Address doesn’t mention slavery explicitly, it’s clear that Lincoln’s thinking had changed a great deal in the previous two years. “Where does that speech come from?” Mahoney asks. “It’s not from the man of 1858. What made him different was the war.”
Lincoln delivered his final speech on April 11, 1865, just two days after the end of the war and three days before he would be assassinated. In it, he outlined his plans for Reconstruction which, he said, would be “fraught with great difficulty.” The 13th Amendment, passed on January 31, abolished slavery throughout the entire country, but the former slaves would not be considered full citizens until the passage of the 14th Amendment three years later. It would be two more years after that before the 15th Amendment granted voting rights to all men. Lincoln himself suggested a slower change: allowing voting rights only to very intelligent black men and former soldiers. (How intelligence was to be determined remained a mystery; it sounds suspiciously like the literacy tests from the Jim Crow era.) “He was following precedent,” says Mahoney. “In the early days, you had to be a property owner to vote. It was a small step. Freedom was one thing, equality was another.”
