Was abraham lincoln actually against slavery?

Question

my teacher told me that he wasn't against slavery, but against the spread of it; I can't remember the details... can someone who really knows explain it to me?

Answer 1

No, he was not, and slavery was a small issue in civil war, and pre-civil war time. During and after the war, Lincoln allowed only the Northern states to continue owning slaves. He made it only illegal for the South. This is a fact, not an opinion.

Answer 2

Initially the civil war was not about slavery, the misouri compromise agreed that slavery be restricted to southern states and not extended to the north or west. Lincoln was prepared to honor that. The civil war was about the supremacy of the federal government over the state government, the south did not agree with that organizational structure.
The war went on for a long time without a clear victor, the north was getting sick of sending their sons into the meat grinder of war for no apparent reason. Lincoln attempted to make the war a noble cause for the north to reinvigorate the populace and get support for the war once again. Thus the emancipation proclamation, it worked. The northern soldiers were heros again on a noble cause. You know the outcome.

Answer 3

Lincoln was a Bigot a Racist and A liar this is exactly what is on record from one of Lincoln's racist speeches One of Lincoln's most representative public statements on the question of racial relations was given in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857.6 In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ... Racial separation, Lincoln went on to say, "must be effected by colonization" of the country's blacks to a foreign land. "The enterprise is a difficult one," he acknowledged, but "where there is a will there is a way," and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be. so where does the Great Emancipator come from. His actions would have Enslaved them Further

Answer 4

To my understanding after reading a few entries from the Wikipedia entry for Abraham Lincoln, he was against slavery. Here are a few of the entries that back this up:

"His parents belonged to a Baptist church that had pulled away from a larger church because they refused to support slavery. From a very young age, Lincoln was exposed to anti-slavery sentiment. However, he never joined his parents' church, or any other church, and as a youth he ridiculed religion."

"In 1837, he made his first protest against slavery in the Illinois House, stating that the institution was 'founded on both injustice and bad policy'."

"It was a speech against the act, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, that caused Lincoln to stand out among the other free soil orators of the day. In the speech, as part of the Lincoln/Douglas debates, Lincoln commented upon the Kansas-Nebraska Act:

Abraham Lincoln:

[The Act has a] declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and epecially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principals of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest."

Answer 5

As a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature, to which he was elected four times from 1834 to 1840, Lincoln devoted himself to a grandiose project for constructing with state funds a network of railroads, highways, and canals. Whigs and Democrats joined in passing an omnibus bill for these undertakings, but the panic of 1837 and the ensuing business depression brought about the abandonment of most of them. While in the legislature he demonstrated that, though opposed to slavery, he was no abolitionist. In 1837, in response to the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery newspaperman of Alton, the legislature introduced resolutions condemning abolitionist societies and defending slavery in the Southern states as “sacred” by virtue of the federal Constitution. Lincoln refused to vote for the resolutions. Together with a fellow member, he drew up a protest that declared, on the one hand, that slavery was “founded on both injustice and bad policy” and, on the other, that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.”

Answer 6

Not many people were against slavery... they were against civil war and a country split in half.... brother fighting brother. The civil war was more about economics than slavery.

Answer 7

Oh, please. How could be against "the spread of it" without being against it? I question why your teacher is saying this. It sounds like more of the liberal agenda in schools to portray the decent men in our history as slave owning tyrants.

If this continues, you need to tell your parents and perhaps they could get you out of that school.

Answer 8

The argument can be made (as previously posted) that he was at the very least more concerned with preserving the Union.

Answer 9

Lincoln was FOR slavery. He owned many slaves. He fathered children with his slaves. Slaves made him rich and allowed him to run and become President.

Answer 10

he was against slavery