Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism

Dorothy Ross

In the history of emancipation, the ethical dimension is always prominent. Since the1960s emancipation has been influentially portrayed as a result of the gradual, halting, but growing triumph of universalist liberal and Christian principles, a key moment in a progressive national narrative of growing freedom. The abolitionists stand astride the story as prophetic and ultimately triumphant voices of principle. We have good reasons to accept that account; universalist ethical principles and abolitionist determination were essential to emancipation. Inspired by the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality, the recovery of the importance of universal principles of human rights in ending slavery in the United States is a major achievement of historiography over the last half century. But the history of emancipation and its implications are skewed if we ignore the complex ethical role of the nation in the process leading to emancipation. As Edward L. Ayers suggested, the current narrative too easily "reassures Americans by reconciling the great anomaly of slavery with an overarching story of a people devoted to liberty." It distorts our understanding of both emancipation and the nation at a crucial moment of their intertwined history.1	1
The nation, of course, has never been absent from considerations of the Civil War era when slavery was abolished. The nation can hardly be removed from the war to save the Union, and the war is always seen as a condition enabling emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments. But the nation has not been always or fully considered as an ethical factor in its own right. This essay is an effort to bring the nation back into the ethics of emancipation. Human rights were always weighed in a moving context, not only of interests and fears but also of other values, and the other value most prominently at work in the abolition of slavery in the United States was the nation. If we reconsider emancipation with that value in view, allegiance to the nation becomes a decisive ethical factor in the abolition of slavery and an ambiguous one, both blocking and advancing emancipation, expanding and limiting commitment to human rights. In that story, Abraham Lincoln stands as both an important actor and an exemplar of the conflicting ethical implications of American nationalism.	2
This photograph of Abraham Lincoln was taken on October 1, 1858, after he had delivered a campaign speech in Pittsfield, Illinois, in his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. His shrewd but defensive gaze and correct dress reveal him as a cautious, astute, and determined politician. Photograph by Calvin Jackson. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division, LS-USZ6–2446.
David Brion Davis's magisterial work is the major source in contemporary historiography for the centrality of the century-long rise of antislavery sentiment in the abolition of slavery in the United States and the Atlantic West.2 As Davis showed, at its core the moral argument against slavery was about the character of humanity—what enlightened thinkers called, using the generic masculine, the true nature of man. In the Anglo-American world, the Protestant and Enlightenment shift toward humanistic values endowed human nature with new dignity, with new capacity for reason, benevolence, and moral choice, and with inherent rights.3 The Anglo-American shift in moral consciousness began to occur just as the North American colonies turned to universal natural rights to declare their independence from Britain, energizing the ideals of human equality and self-determination.	. . .