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.The doctrine of the immediateabolition of slavery asks no better authority than is offered by scripture.It isin perfect harmony with the letter and spirit of God s word.It is the dutyof the holders of slaves immediately to restore them to their liberty, and toextend to them the full protection of law, as well as its control.Also, itis the duty of all men to proclaim this doctrine to urge upon slaveholdersimmediate emancipation, so long as there is a slave to agitate the consciencesof tyrants, as long as there is a tyrant on the globe.But Lincoln was unconvinced that any human action was so completely withinthe control of the human will that an immediate renunciation of habit andself-interest could be expected from anyone, much less from slaveholders, whosehabit was reinforced by racial contempt and whose self-interest was reinforcedby the fabulous profits of the cotton trade.And he would have found unre-alistic, in both religious and political terms, the kind of immediatist adviceArthur Tappan gave to Theodore Dwight Weld as an agent of the AmericanAnti-Slavery Society in 1834:You will inculcate every where, the great fundamental principle of Immedi-ate Abolition, as the duty of all masters, on the ground that slavery is bothunjust and unprofitable.Insist principally on the sin of slavery, becauseour main hope is in the consciences of men.We reprobate the idea ofcompensation to slave holders, because it implies the right of slavery.We also reprobate all plans of expatriation, by whatever specious pretencescovered, as a remedy for slavery, for they all proceed from prejudices againstcolor; and we hold that the duty of whites in regard to this cruel prejudiceis not to indulge it, but to repent and overcome it.17Immediatism was not the only religious attitude among the abolitionists thatalienated Lincoln.The great obstruction on the road to repentance, accord-96  fiends.facing zionwardsing to both the revivalists and the abolitionists, was selfishness.To a certainextent, Lincoln agreed: selfishness described the full extent of human actionand even explained his decision to free slaves as an appeal to the self-interestof the slaves which would impel them to take up arms against the South.Forthe abolitionists, however, selfishness was exactly what they believed they hadtranscended and expected slaveholders to transcend. We have no selfish mo-tive to appeal to, Wendell Phillips confidently asserted in 1852. We appealto white men, who cannot see any present interest they have in the slave ques-tion and ask them to  ascend to a level of disinterestedness which the massesseldom reach, before we can create any excitement in them on the questionsof slavery. But excitement, the fuel which Phillips hoped to ignite in orderto overcome selfishness, was precisely what Lincoln feared to interject intopublic discourse.In 1838, he warned that the chief threat to liberty was  theincreasing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu ofthe sober judgments of the Courts. And twenty-three years later, on the eveof the secession of the Southern states from the Union, he was still warningthat  though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affec-tion. But Phillips, in outlining the  Philosophy of the Abolition Movementin 1853 for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, insisted that passion wasthe only cure for slavery-inspired moral lethargy.Old School clergy and  Cot-ton Whigs, Phillips complained,  are ever parading their wish to draw a linebetween themselves and us, because they must be permitted to wait, to trustmore to reason than feeling, to indulge a generous charity, to rely on thesure influence of simple truth, uttered in love, &c., &c [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]