"Lincoln's main thesis was that the Slavery issue had to be decided one way or the other and could no longer be evaded by compromise." Comment in the light of his role in the American Civil War.

Answer:

Abraham Lincoln came to hold that the question of slavery could no longer be evaded by compromise but had to be settled decisively one way or the other, and his role in the Civil War, from the preservation of the Union through to emancipation, reflected the steady working-out of this conviction.

The failure of compromise

• Successive compromises, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to that of 1850, had only postponed the crisis.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision inflamed the sectional conflict still further.
• Lincoln held that the nation could not permanently endure 'half slave and half free'.

Lincoln's role in the war

• His election in 1860 precipitated Southern secession and the formation of the Confederacy.
• His primary aim at first was to preserve the Union, above even the abolition of slavery.
• He led the North with firmness and resolve through the long and immensely costly war.

Emancipation and settlement

• The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 turned the war into a struggle against slavery itself.
• Union victory and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, deciding the issue permanently.
• The question was thus settled by war rather than compromise, exactly as Lincoln had come to believe it must be.

The deeper conflict

• Two divergent social and economic systems, industrial North and slave-plantation South, had grown apart.
• The question of slavery's extension into the western territories made conflict unavoidable.
• The Gettysburg Address redefined the war as a test of whether such a nation could endure.
• The Republican Party's rise signalled that the North would no longer concede.

Assessment

• His leadership converted a war for the Union into a war for human freedom.
• The Union was preserved and slavery ended, though at the cost of some six hundred thousand lives.
• Reconstruction, cut short by his assassination in 1865, left racial equality unfinished.
• His thesis, that the issue could no longer be evaded, was fully vindicated by events.

Lincoln's evolving position

• He began as a moderate opposed to slavery's extension rather than an outright abolitionist.
• In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 he argued against popular sovereignty on the issue.
• He initially offered the South constitutional guarantees to preserve the Union.
• War, military necessity and the need for a moral cause moved him towards emancipation.
• The enlistment of black soldiers made emancipation irreversible in practice.
• By 1865 he was pressing for the Thirteenth Amendment as a permanent settlement.

Lincoln's thesis is thus borne out by his role in the war: slavery, having defied every compromise for four decades, was finally decided by the sword. As historians recognise, his leadership settled the irrepressible conflict that compromise had only deferred, ending slavery and preserving the American Union, even though the fuller promise of racial equality was left to a later age.