Why Is Slavery Wrong

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Slavery of Africans has been brewing up since the early 1600’s. The first African slaves were brought To Jamestown, Virginia to help with the growth and production of crops. Slavery continued to be practiced and African slaves eventually helped build the foundation of the new nation. It wasn’t until the early 1800’s that slavery became an issue between the southern and northern territories. There were several abolitionist and antislavery people who wanted slavery to end and to be abolished. One of those men was Fredrick Douglas. Fredrick Douglas was a former slave who escape his master and eventually gained his freedom. Then there was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was a senator of Illinois and eventually became the sixteenth president of the United States. From an early age Lincoln believed slavery was wrong. These two men were similar in some ways but in other ways they were very different. Lincoln and Douglas were similar in one big way. Both men disliked slavery and wished for it to be gone and abolished. They both agreed that there were no constitutional right to own slaves. In 1858 Lincoln declared “I have always hated slavery” “I think as much as an abolitionist” (The Radical and the Republican pg.41). Lincoln like Douglas opposed slavery and spoke out about it openly as much as possible. They wanted people to know that they believed slavery was wrong. Lincoln believed that any working man, whatever race, should be entitled to any of their workings. Meaning if they worked for it, than they should be allowed to have what they worked for. Like Lincoln, Douglas believed slavery was wrong and that the Anti-Slavery sentiment was one of the most important elements of the Republican Party. Although Lincoln and Douglas served the same thought about slavery they were different in many ways. …show more content…
For one Lincoln was white and was born free; while Douglas was African and was born into slavery himself. Even though both men hated slavery and wanted it abolished, they hated it for different reasons. Douglas believed slavery was wrong, and that it was cruel. He said black women were being raped, men were being murdered, and that blacks were being beat, and not one white man was being punished for these crimes. Douglas not only believed that slavery was wrong and hated it but he hated the slaveholders as well and wanted them to pay for treating slaves so poorly and for treating them as property. On the other hand Lincoln hated slavery because he believed everyone had rights to be treated like a human and that no man had the right to own another man. Lincoln didn’t believe in equal rights between whites and blacks, but he did believe slavery was morally wrong. Lincoln’s anti-slavery politic eventually were fused together with his hatred for slavery. He began to believe that slavery was evil, and that slavery should be wrong and should be treated as wrong. Lincoln however never talked bad about the salve holder them self’s like Douglas did. Douglas would speak about the slave holders as sinners and that they would pay the ultimate price in the end. Lincoln believed that the slaveholder were only doing what they were raised to do and that slaveholders couldn’t be blamed for doing the only thing they knew. He never called slaveholder sinners, or hypocrites. By the time Lincoln started running for president there were already issues arising between the Southern and Northern territories. The previous president James Knox Polk, had already annexed Texas and was in the middle of provoking war with Mexico. Polk wanted to take control of parts of Mexico and add it to the United States. This was a big issue because Northern states believed Polk only provoked the war with Mexico to expand slavery. Abraham Lincoln voted for bill to end slave trade in Washington D.C., and even drafted one of his own bills to abolish slavery entirely in the nation’s capital while he was in Washington D.C. as a senator. Lincoln stated that “God will settle the slavery question, and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of evil” “but for the present it

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