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Jaffa disagrees. He devotes a considerable chunk of his book to demonstrating both the growth and the sincerity of Lincoln's opposition to slavery. Answering, for example, the claim that Lincoln cared about slavery only for the political advantage it might yield, Jaffa offers a bit of realpolitik:
Are we to say that Lincoln's reasons for thinking slavery morally wrong are to be discounted because he presented them in political campaigns? … There is reason to believe that Lincoln wrestled long and hard in private with the question of the morality of slavery, as he had with the question of free will and predestination. Having come to a conclusion, however, he could not let the matter rest there. Moral arguments point to moral obligations. Lincoln could advance the antislavery cause only by gaining political advantage for the antislavery argument.
Moreover, as Jaffa points out, Lincoln opposed slavery in public even when taking that position was risky. After all, although it is easy to forget the fact, he lost the Senate seat he contested with Stephen Douglas.
Then there is the matter of the Emancipation Proclamation, once considered among the great political documents of history. Jaffa is unpersuaded by revisionist scholarship insisting that it was a cynical document of little actual effect:
The Emancipation Proclamation progressively deprived the Confederacy of a vast reservoir of slave labor, which had enabled many more Southern whites to serve in the Confederate ranks than would otherwise have been possible. It also added great numbers of emancipated slaves to the ranks of the Union armies, as well as giving them the greatest of all incentives to fight. Notwithstanding the Proclamation's exceptions and exemptions, which proved temporary, it destroyed the viability of the institution of chattel slavery in the whole Union.
What about the charge that the Proclamation, because justified on the ground of "military necessity," should not be taken seriously as an assertion of moral authority? Writes Jaffa:
In issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln acted from military necessity. In the Gettysburg address, Lincoln called upon the nation to ratify what had been done, not simply because it was necessary, but because it was good.
This argument does not quite refute the central charge of Lincoln's critics, who believe that he did as little toward freeing the slaves as he could, but Jaffa may well be right that they are reading his words too literally, not understanding the subtle mind at work beneath it all. Perhaps by doing as much (not as little) as he thought he could, and by justifying his actions not merely as a military necessity but also as fealty due a higher principle, he sought to inspire his countrymen to do what was right once the terrible war ended. Or maybe, as Lincoln's critics insist, it was all cynical.
But this seems unlikely. Jaffa is meticulous in distinguishing two aspects of Lincoln's thought on slavery that many of the sixteenth president's contemporary critics tend to conflate. It is true, says Jaffa, that candidate Lincoln consistently denied any intention of using federal power to end slavery (other than by restricting its expansion). But this was the only possible response to the campaign by Democrats (including Lincoln's predecessor, the pro-slavery Buchanan) who tried to defeat the Republicans by smearing them with responsibility for John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry.
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