With Malice Toward None

The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition    

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On March 26, 1864, former Senator Archibald Dixon, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, and Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort, Kentucky, Commonwealth, met with Lincoln to discuss the recruitment of slaves as soldiers in Kentucky. Considerable dissatisfaction had arisen in the Blue Grass state because, although the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply in the border states, runaway slaves could gain their freedom through military service. Lincoln heard the group’s complaints but persuasively outlined the benefits of allowing blacks to serve in the federal army. Hodges was so convinced that he asked the president to put his arguments in writing. The result is perhaps Lincoln’s most candid statement on slavery.

(Transcription)

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency ...


On March 26, 1864, former Senator Archibald Dixon, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, and Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort, Kentucky, <em>Commonwealth</em>, met with Lincoln to discuss the recruitment of slaves as soldiers in Kentucky. Considerable dissatisfaction had arisen in the Blue Grass state because, although the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply in the border states, runaway slaves could gain their freedom through military service. Lincoln heard the group’s complaints but persuasively outlined the benefits of allowing blacks to serve in the federal army. Hodges was so convinced that he asked the president to put his arguments in writing. The result is perhaps Lincoln’s most candid statement on slavery.