Yet, in truth, there was not in the North an
Abolitionist who thought worse of the institution of slavery than did
the man who had repeatedly declared it to be "a moral, a social, and a
political evil." Referring to these times, and the behavior of the
Abolitionists, he afterward wrote:[33]--
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never
understood that the presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right
to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I
took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the
office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an
oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood,
too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to
practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question
of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways.
And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere
deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did
understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the
best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every
indispensable means, that government,--that nation, of which that
Constitution was the organic law.
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