Modern Abolitionists: What Can We Learn From Lincoln?

What can we learn from President Lincoln about combating modern slavery?

I just finished The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner. The book explores how President Lincoln’s ideas about slavery evolved. It’s a good book if you want to go deep on the topic, but it’s narrowly focused. As such, it will not be a popular book. It can get a bit thick at times.

Even though the book is hard to recommend, it triggered some questions that I want to explore because it covered the idea of public opinion shaping the conversation about slavery.

This April will be the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Advocates for the South like to claim the war was always about State’s rights and was never about slavery. That’s disingenuous at best. Anybody who takes the time to read the history can quickly see that the Civil War was all about slavery.

However, the North (and my paternal side was as Yankee as my maternal side was Rebel) needs to own up to their real motivations for the war. Yes, slavery and preserving the union were the main issues.  Yes, many Northerners were aghast at the very idea of slavery.  But taking the moral high road only tells part of the story.

Here’s the buried story about that war: the average Joe living in the States without slavery — the farmer trying to make a living in Indiana, the merchant in Boston, the gold miner in California, etc. — was against slavery for economic reasons.

Imagine, for instance, if slavery had been legal in California during the gold rush. Massive mines would have been opened that combined the horrible conditions of apartheid in South Africa with the exploitive labor conditions of tobacco plantations in the South. The average gold prospector could never have competed against that. The same holds true for farming in the Mid-West or the production of textiles in the Northeast.

Slavery represented a significant threat to their ability to earn a living.  Many of these business and farm owners also cared about the injustice of slavery, but what prompted them to action was the specter of Southern slave owners coming into their community and disrupting their economic well being.

In other words, a lot of those Northern soldiers didn’t march off to Gettysburg to die for the rights of blacks to be free. They died to defend their own economic well being.

Moral high road? To be sure there were many who felt slavery was an abomination that violated a host of moral, spiritual and legal rights.

But I’m not convinced the average Northerner was ready to engage in war over that issue. That decision to (literally) pull the trigger was largely fueled by self-interest.

So that got me thinking about slavery today.

What does this teach us about the modern abolitionist movement? In a world where so many women and men are trafficked into some kind of slavery, will it take more than the moral high road to combat the evil? Will it take some sort of economic incentive to rally the average person to the cause?

I don’t have any answers to these questions … but would love some feedback. What are your thoughts?