Overview

Lincoln’s contacts with Kentucky slavery helped the president formulate his antislavery views.  His position eventually led him to push for emancipation and the enlistment of African Americans into the Union army.

When Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency, his views on slavery had been shaped by his political beliefs and his personal experiences.  At the beginning of his administration, Lincoln, like his political idol Henry Clay, believed in gradual emancipation with colonizing the freed slaves in Africa.  He, like many other Republicans, hoped to prevent the spread of slavery, thinking that if the institution were contained where it existed, it would eventually wither and die.

Lincoln had direct experiences with Kentucky slavery.  His in-laws, the Todds, were slave owners, and, while visiting Lexington in 1847 and 1848, he learned firsthand about the institution.  Because of these visits to Kentucky, his ideas that slavery should not be permitted to spread were strengthened.  Lincoln’s distaste of slavery was also bolstered during another trip to the Bluegrass State.  While visiting Louisville, Lincoln saw a group of slaves forced onto a boat.  The memory of these slaves separated from their families remained embedded in his mind.  Lincoln recalled the incident in an 1855 letter to his friend Joshua Speed.  “You may remember,” Lincoln wrote, “as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me[having] the power of making me miserable.”  This vision contributed to Lincoln’s evolving attitudes toward slavery.

As president, Lincoln initially hoped that Kentuckians would accept compensated emancipation, a process whereby they would be paid to free their slaves.  Kentuckians rejected this offer.  Lincoln, however, warned the state that unless they accepted compensated emancipation, it was likely that the Civil War would end slavery, leaving slaveholding Kentuckians to suffer vast economic losses.  This proved prophetic. Read More about the Emancipation Proclamation.