Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available through the University of California at Santa Barbara. Resolved, That we, the delegated representatives of the Republican electors of the United States in Convention assembled, in discharge of the duty we owe to our constituents and our country, unite in the following declarations: That the history of the nation during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph.
That to the Union of the States this nation owes its unprecedented increase in population, its surprising development of material resources, its rapid augmentation of wealth, its happiness at home and its honor abroad; and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for disunion, come from whatever source they may.
And we congratulate the country that no Republican member of Congress has uttered or countenanced the threats of disunion so often made by Democratic members, without rebuke and with applause from their political associates; and we denounce those threats of disunion, in case of a popular overthrow of their ascendency as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence.
That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
That the present Democratic Administration has far exceeded our worst apprehensions, in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of a sectional interest, as especially evinced in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Lecompton Constitution upon the protesting people of Kansas; in construing the personal relations between master and servant to involve an unqualified property in persons; in its attempted enforcement everywhere, on land and sea, through the intervention of Congress and of the Federal Courts of the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest; and in its general and unvarying abuse of the power intrusted to it by a confiding people.
This is particularly important for those of us who are concerned with the building of revolutionary organization today. It is important to stress that Freedom National takes a relatively narrow view of emancipation as a social and political process. The book contains fairly little discussion of African American agency and slave resistance in the coming of emancipation.
Freedom National needs to be read alongside material detailing the other aspects of the road to emancipation. Still, the focus on antislavery constitutionalism presents Oakes with some problems. Having stressed the continuity of antislavery politics in the program of the Republican Party, the author faces the challenge of explaining how and why that policy actually shifted during the Civil War.
Although Oakes himself highlights the danger of teleology, Freedom National consistently wrestles with the question of whether the end of slavery was a foregone conclusion once the Republicans assumed the powers of a wartime government. Put another way: we must ask if Oakes helps us to understand why Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of rather than the spring of The fact is, of course, that the Republicans were not fully the masters of the situation during the years of the Civil War.
Once the military struggle began, and once the first fugitive slaves arrived at Union lines, the process of emancipation assumed a logic that transcended the intentions even of those at the highest level of government.
Lincoln and Douglass were both wrestling with the problem of conscious human agency in a revolutionary situation. Certainly Oakes is right to reemphasize the importance of the leading role played by the Lincoln and the Republican government. But the Civil War was ultimately a revolution—a great struggle between contending social classes. In this sense, the destruction of slavery vindicated not only the antislavery constitutionalism of the Republican mainstream, but also a countertradition within the abolitionist movement, exemplified in activists such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown, who had called for—and even attempted—the violent, revolutionary overthrow of chattel slavery.
The Thirteenth Amendment was as much the result of their tireless work as it was the result of the process Oakes describes in Freedom National. Skip to main content.
Review by James Illingworth. Issue 90 : Reviews Share. By James Oakes. Search form Search. Issue contents. Top story Yurii Colombo. Bill Mullen. Lee Wengraf. Snehal Shingavi. Keith Rosenthal. Doug Enaa Greene. Andrew Ryder. Slavery a Positive Good.
Speech on Abolition Petitions. Protest in Illinois Legislature on Slavery. First Inaugural Address Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condi Lyceum Address. Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Con Address to the Slaves of the United States.
Letter to Richard Pakenham, British Minister to th The American Union. Letter to Williamson Durley. Wilmot Proviso. Speech on the Mexican War. American Slavery. Speech on the Oregon Bill. State of the Union Address Part I Annual Message to Congress The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to t Uses and Abuses of the Bible. Civil Disobedience. Compromise of Colored people of Boston.
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Emigration of the Colored People of the United Sta Our Elevation in the United States. Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Appeal of the Independent Democrats. Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to Nebraska Territory.
Fragments on Slavery. Kansas-Nebraska Act. Speech on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Broadside Advertisement for Runaway Slave. The Doom of the Black Power. Letter to George Robertson.
Letter to Joshua F. The Last Flogging. Democratic Party Platforms. Dred Scott v. Speech on the Dred Scott Decision. Reply to the Dred Scott Decision. Cotton is King. Mud Sill Speech. Dred Scott and Disunion. House Divided Speech. Homecoming Speech at Chicago. Speech at Chicago, Illinois. Speech at Springfield, Illinois. Speech in Reply to Douglas at Springfield, Illinoi Fragment on Slavery.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates 1st Debate. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates 2nd Debate. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates 5th Debate. Letter to J. African Civilization Society. Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural So John Brown and the Principle of Nonresistance. Republican Party Platform.
Republican Party Platform of Democratic Party Platform of Southern Desperation. Distribution of the Slave Population by State. Fragment on the Constitution and Union. Inaugural Address. First Inaugural Address. Defense of Lincoln. The Folly of Colonization.
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