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It argued that the Constitution could and should be used to eventually end slavery, but that the Constitution gave the national government no authority to abolish slavery in the states directly. However, multiple tactics were available to support the long-term strategy of using the Constitution as a battering ram against the peculiar institution.
Slavery in the territories: Lincoln asserted that nothing in the Constitution expressly said what either could or could not be done regarding slavery in the territories. He indicated his willingness to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act , so long as free blacks could be protected from being kidnapped and illegally sold into slavery through its misuse.
Constitution of the United States. Although the original United States Constitution did not contain the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, [1] it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document.
The sum of the whole is, that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one – a clear majority of the whole – certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories ...
The U.S. Constitution does not use the term slavery but the existence of slavery in the United States did influence the compromises and agreements that were made within the document.
Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on Saturday, March 4, 1865, during his second inauguration as President of the United States.At a time when victory over secessionists in the American Civil War was within days and slavery in all of the U.S. was near an end, Lincoln did not speak of happiness, but of sadness.
Check this out: These are very likely the words of Abraham Lincoln. What it says is actually kind of boring -- just the name of a lawyer and friend. But where it is is what makes this fascinating.
Famously, eight years before Lincoln's speech, during the Senate debate on the Compromise of 1850, Sam Houston had proclaimed: "A nation divided against itself cannot stand." However and most relevantly, the expression was used repeatedly earlier in 1858 in discussions of the situation in Kansas , where slavery was the central issue.