160 YEARS AGO
Excerpts from a letter penned by President Abraham Lincoln to A.G. Hodges of Frankfort, Kentucky dated April 4, 1864: “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.”
May 6, 1864…