Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln's Reasoning, emanicpation proclamation, revolutionary changge, Thirteenth Amendment, democracy, America, civil war, democratic principles
Abraham Lincoln's presidency was a defining crucible in the evolution of the American nation's conception of democracy, as the burning issue of slavery precipitated an existential crisis that challenged the very foundations on which the republic was built. And so the debate on the peculiar institution brought home to the American people the basic contradictions between the high-sounding words of liberty and equality in their new charters and the cruel facts of a system that systematically denied these principles to a whole section of the people. Under these circumstances, Lincoln's presidency proved decisive in changing the boundaries of democracy in America, and his administration ultimately redefined its substance and reach in the epic decisions represented by the Emancipation Proclamation and the eventual ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
[...] The debate over slavery and Lincoln's decisive actions had, in a way, changed the entire nation's way of thinking about democracy. It broadened to include the emancipation of a whole class of its citizens and later laid down principles by amendments and civil rights acts, under which the nation adhered to its belief in equality and justice for all. The road to realizing these democratic ideals, though long and arduous, full of setbacks and resistance, was crystallized in the very person of Abraham Lincoln during his presidency and in the crucible of the Civil War. [...]
[...] Thus, he stated during the annual message to Congress of 1862, something that expressed the basic contradiction of slavery with the principles of the republic: "In giving freedom to the enslaved person, we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth" (Teaching American History, n.d.). This eloquent statement of Lincoln expressed his vision of a nation where freedom and equality were not hollow words but truly realized values, without which the very idea of the Union would remain incomplete. [...]
[...] M. (2007). Act of Justice: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War. In JSTOR. University Press of Kentucky. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcrrq Finkelman, P. (2010) The Civil War, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Columbia University Press EBooks, 36-57. [...]
[...] According to McPherson et al. (2002), by proclaiming all enslaved people in the rebellious states to be forever free, Lincoln not only took the war from merely a struggle for the integrity of the Union but also elevated it to a moral crusade against the scourge of slavery, a cause that lent new vigor and new inspiration to all democratic ideas of the nation. The Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued, brought out divergent, totally different reactions in the Northern and Southern states, showing how profound the differences and the opposite of the positions that had brought on the Civil War. [...]
[...] https://doi.org/10.7312/tses14144-004 McPherson, J. M., Sears, S. W., Wicker, T., & Perret, G. (2002). The Civil War Reader iBooks. Schwartz, B. (2015). The Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln's Many Second Thoughts. [...]
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