Lincoln Jonesboro Joint Debate Analysis

Abraham Lincoln did not believe that slavery should be abolished as soon as possible; he rather believed that slavery should be restricted and no longer extend to other states (or territories) in the Union that don’t already have slavery. This specific belief made him a free-soiler; he was not an abolitionist. He also believed that the very mention of spreading slavery was the reason for the conflicts within the Union in the first place; at the Jonesboro Joint Debate, he replied to his opponent then-senator Stephen Douglas that “we have generally had comparative peace upon the slavery question” until it was “excited by the effort to spread it into new territory” (7). He later goes on to blaming violent conflicts like the Mexican War on the question of spreading slavery: He says that “Whenever there has been an effort to spread it there has been agitation and resistance” (7).

Lincoln wants to resolve this question so that the conflicts won’t continue, so he answer the slavery should not spread because he believes that it is “wrong and [therefore] ought to be restricted” (12), which is a statement he writes in a letter to Alexander H. Stephens. Lincoln clearly does not want to abolish slavery right away: he directly expresses this in another debate between him and Douglas when he says that he is states that he does “not stand to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia” (5). If he truly did want to abolish slavery as soon as possible, he wouldn’t have said that he didn’t want to abolish it in the District of Columbia. In fact, he doesn’t want to abolish it at all; he is not an abolitionist. At simply wants to restrict it from spreading. In his speech at Cooper Institute, he states that slavery is, in fact, wrong, but the country can “yet afford to let it alone where it is”