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The Crooked Path to Abolition - Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R591
Discovery Miles 5 910
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The Crooked Path to Abolition - Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (Hardcover)
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Was R637
Loot Price R591
Discovery Miles 5 910
You Save R46 (7%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has
often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of
anti-slavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes's
brilliant history of Lincoln's anti-slavery strategies reveals a
striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The
linchpin of anti-slavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the
United States. Lincoln adopted the anti-slavery view that the
Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery
the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where
state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery
and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state
action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With
this understanding, Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies used every
tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the
Constitution empowered direct federal action-in the western
territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade-they
intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to
abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He re-entered politics in 1854
to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the
territories to slavery by the Kansas/Nebraska Act. He attempted to
persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition
with compensation for slaveholders and the colonisation of free
Blacks abroad. President Lincoln took full advantage of the
anti-slavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who
escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation
Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery
across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which
then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King's
cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in
1865 finally abolished slavery.
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