Famous Lincoln Quotes

Abraham Lincoln  At first Lincoln and America were reluctant emancipators, but slavery soon imposed it's own purposes on both our president and on this nation. America was largely indisposed to respect the humanity of the African-Americans here and paid for that sin with death and destruction. Our obtuseness was made manifest in the Jim Crow laws and attitudes of a century later.

A greatly fallen human race is rarely as honorable as the principles which it espouses and even Abrahan Lincoln had growing to do in that regard. His words reflect his growth as the Great Emancipator.

• "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." (House Divided Speech, June 16, 1858)
• They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up." (Speaking of Southerners, Springfield, Illinois in October, 1854)
• "When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith tells me that 'all men are created equal' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another." (Springfield, Illinois, October, 1854)
• "I want every man to have the chance - and I believe a black man is entitled to it - in which he can better his condition, when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is the true system." (Speech at New Haven, March 6, 1860)

 Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address pointed a grieving nation to the mystery of divine providence.

"He invoked a fiery biblical quotation: "Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!" (Matthew 18:7). Lincoln used Scripture this time as an indictment of slavery and a formal charge against the American people...."

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." Emphasis added. 

NPS: Antietam battlefield

"By saying American slavery, he asserted that North and South must together own the offense. Lincoln understood that the people of the South would never be able to take their full places in the Union if they alone were saddled with the guilt for what Lincoln asserted was the national offense of slavery"