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Typically, students learn about Abraham Lincoln's views and policies regarding slavery and race as they were formulated after his emergence on the national stage during and after his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 and especially during his presidency. Lincoln, however, stated on a number of occasions that he had always hated slavery. This teaching strategy focuses on the years before the LincolnDouglas debates and on his public utterances on slavery and race, beginning with his first public statement in March 1837, when he was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. His private views, as Michael Ryan-Kessler suggests, had a much longer history than that. One might ask: How did Lincoln, born in a slave state and raised in a southern midwestern culture that was virulentiy racist, emerge so differentiy from most of those with whom he grew up? And why Stephen Douglas, a native of Vermont, never publicly challenged the morality of slavery?
National Standards
Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Standard 2D: The student understands the rapid growth of "the peculiar institution" after 1800 and the varied experiences of African Americans under slavery.
Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Standard 1A: The student understands how the North and South differed and how politics and ideologies led to the Civil War.
Objectives
1. To examine the ideological development of Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward race and slavery prior to 1858.
2. To identify economic, political, philosophical, and moral feelings toward slavery by examining primary source documents.
Time Frame
One to two class periods.
Background
In an April 4, 1864 letter to A. G. Hodges of Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling" (1). Lincoln knew slavery all his life. He was born in Kentucky-a slave state. His father brought the family to Indiana-a free state. Partially because of his observations of slavery made on two trips down the Mississippi River to New Orleans-the first at age nineteen and the second at twenty-two-he took a growing interest in the...