and now, put it in context

Posted on: February 21, 2019 at 10:35:32 CT

But what his critics both now and then fail to recognize is that Lincoln had only one constitutional duty: to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union, and to do this he had to maintain a working coalition of, on the one hand, his own Republican party, which sought to end slavery and on the other, "War Democrats," who were willing to fight to restore the Union but who did not want to interfere with slavery.

In addition-and this is critically important to understand-Lincoln had no power to end slavery on his own. In this age of executive overreach when our current president seems to believe that he may do whatever he wants "with a phone and a pen," it is imperative for us to understand that Lincoln accepted the fact that he was constrained by the Constitution, which granted the Federal government no authority over the institution of slavery in the states where it existed. This authority lay strictly with the states themselves. Thus Lincoln could not, as one recent critic has written, simply end slavery with the stroke of a pen.

Lincoln clearly and concisely conveyed his understanding of his constitutional responsibility to save the Union and preserve the Constitution in a famous letter to Horace Greeley:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be to "the Union as it was"....My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.