Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president for the United States of America.
He was considered on of the greatest presidents because of his fight and success in getting rid of slavery. Before Lincoln was president he was a self-thought lawyer from Illinois. Lincoln was president from March 1861 until his assassination by Johns Wilkes Booth in April 1865. Abraham Lincoln had many views on slavery and not a lot of people know exactly what they were. Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution.
The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did not explicitly write the word “slavery” in the Constitution, but they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count slaves for the purposes of representation in the federal government. In a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854, Lincoln presented more clearly than ever his moral, legal and economic opposition to slavery—and then admitted he didn’t know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system.Lincoln didn’t believe blacks should have the same rights as whites. Though Lincoln argued that the founding fathers’ phrase “All men are created equal” applied to blacks and whites alike, this did not mean he thought they should have the same social and political rights. Lincoln thought colonization could resolve the issue of slavery.
For much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization—or the idea that a majority of the African-American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America—was the best way to confront the problem of slavery.His two great political heroes, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization; both were slave owners who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that blacks and whites could live together peaceably Emancipation was a military policy. As much as Lincoln hated the institution of slavery, Lincoln didn’t see the Civil War as a struggle to free the nation’s 4 million slaves from bondage. Emancipation, when it came, would have to be gradual, and the important thing to do was to prevent the Southern rebellion from severing the Union permanently in two.But as the Civil War entered its second summer in 1862, thousands of slaves had fled Southern plantations to Union lines, and the federal government didn’t have a clear policy on how to deal with them.
Emancipation, Lincoln saw, would further undermine the Confederacy while providing the Union with a new source of manpower to crush the rebellion. Some of other thing that Lincoln believed in while fighting against slavery was that Lincoln believed that the government should provide aid to all freed slaves allowing them to establish their own colonies where they could enjoy equal political and civil rights.Lincoln also compensated the slaves for fighting in the war for many of these people it was the first amount of money that they had ever received. Many people don’t realize this but the emancipation proclamation did not free the slaves what it actually did was made it illegal for people to buy sell and trade slaves.
President Lincoln was a great president he accomplished many great things while he was in office and is most known for his fight against slavery. Thing these days would be a lot tougher if this never happened and that is why he goes down in the history books.
