Y'all are ignoring that Slavery was Legal at the time. miles
That is the one thing that is totally forgotten by those who love and defend Lincoln. Moral implications aside, it was a legal institution. If a president today were to declare gun ownership as illegal, demand that they all be turned in, and go to war with the citizens that refused to comply with his demands and instead set up their own government..............the same people who defend Lincoln for what he did, would be ready to do to that president what Wilkes did to Lincoln.
Slavery was legal in the South. It was not legal in the northwest territories and importation of slaves was illegal after 1808. Moreover, the voters, in a free and fair election elected a president running on a party platform which promised to prohibit the expansion of slavery into new territories. At the same time, Lincoln was adamant that slavery, where it was then and there practiced (viz., in the South) should not be molested or interfered with.
But chattel slavery (the owning of and exploitation of other human beings as if they were chattel) is morally wrong. Gun ownership is morally right. Slavery, unlike gun ownership was not a positive moral good. The Founders universally viewed it as an evil but one that had to be accommodated by the brute fact of its prevalence in the colonies. (In fact, in the Declaration, Jefferson blamed the British for foisting slavery on the colonies.) The concessions to slavery in the Constitution of 1787 were prudential concessions, meaning they were concessions made to the existence of an evil (slavery) in order to achieve a greater good. Specifically, those concessions permitted the adoption of a Constitution and hence the formation of a Union of sufficient strength to, as Lincoln said, "put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction". Lincoln said of Jefferson (speaking of the Declaration of Independence):
"This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
