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Letter to George Robertson

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, August 15, 1855.

My Dear Sir: The volume you left for me has been received. I am really grateful for the honor of your kind remembrance, as well as for

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the book. The partial reading I have already given it has afforded me much of both pleasure and instruction. It was new to me that the exact question which led to the Missouri Compromise had arisen before it arose in regard to Missouri, and that you had taken so prominent a part in it. Your short but able and patriotic speech upon that occasion has not been improved upon since by those holding the same views, and, with all the lights you then had the views you took appear to me as very reason able.

You are not a friend to slavery in the abstract. In that speech you spoke of "the peaceful extinction of slavery," and used other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was at some time to have an end. Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure of Henry Clay and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect anything in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguished that hope utterly. On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are

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created equal" a self-evident truth, but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day--for burning fire-crackers!!!

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution. Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States adopted systems of emancipation at once, and it is a significant fact that not a single State has done the like since. So far as peaceful voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Our political problem now is, "Can we as a nation continue together permanently--forever --half slave and half free?" The problem is too mighty for me--may God, in his mercy,

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superintend the solution.

Your much obliged friend and humble servant,
A. LINCOLN.

nts

Notes

1. In this letter to the Hon. George Robertson Lincoln sounds the note of his famous "house divided against itself" speech delivered three years later. The reader will also note the almost prophetic asseveration in reference to the Czar of Russia and the "American masters." The "Autocrat of all the Russias" emancipated his serfs the day before Lincoln's first inauguration. Six weeks later the "American masters" began the Civil War.