ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln: An Address Delivered Before the Essex Institute and the City Government of Salem at the Tabernacle Church, Salem, February 12, 1909

It is not impossible that slavery at the South might have gradually yielded in the course of years to the advancing sense of humanity, and have been disposed of without violence, giving way to industrial systems in which the imported negroes and their descendants might have re mained to till in peace the soil on which most of them were born, with at least as near an approach to justice and fair dealing as they now enjoy, and the South might have been spared the devastation, the madness of her dominant class invoked upon her head. But this was not to be. Conceiving that while she enjoyed the control of the cotton-market of the world, she was superior to political dictation and almost, it would seem, to moral restraint, the united cotton-industry of the South faced squarely about, - defied the deliberate judgment of the civilized world pronounced in its arraignment of chattel-slavery, and arrogantly proposed the indefinite extension and per petuity of it, and the rebpening of the slave trade. This, with a re'enforcing of the legal provisions exacted by the South of the Federal government, for the return of fugitive slaves escaping to the free states, and the proposal to enforce, in the common territories of the nation, the same property rights in slave property which were guaranteed in other kinds of property, brought on a crisis which could probably have been met in no other way but by a resort to arms. And the final verdict of history will record the fact that, in supposing they could, while con sulting no interests or preferences but their own, turn their backs on their traditional distrust of slavery, - its thriftlessness, its immorality, its perpetual nightmare dread of servile insurrection,-that they could turn their backs upon all this at will, and force their fellow-citizens to help them extend and perpetuate the monstrous anach ronism - a policy which united against them in advance the population of the N orth, - more than ready as it was for every consession compatible with manhood, - a population out-ranking them two to one in numbers, wealth, mechan ical capacity, industrial development, general intelligence, - ih every manly attribute except audacious courage, - ih taking this fatal step, the Southern people will be found.

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