Lincoln and Slavery – Abraham Lincoln was born into a family that espoused antislavery beliefs. His father, Thomas, despised slavery because of his religious views as well as the realization of a hard truth: a farmer working in a state reliant on slave labor could not financially compete with the large-scale operations of forced labor plantations. Chattel slavery—a violent and dehumanizing form of servitude that legally defined Black people as property in order to deny them basic human rights—was an institution designed to destroy Black families and lives. It was also foundational to the social, political, and economic realities of life in Lincoln’s time. By 1860, almost four million Black men, women, and children lived in bondage—one out of every seven people in America. Auctions of enslaved Black people were open markets where human beings were stripped naked, inspected like animals, and then sold to the highest bidder. While Lincoln was always against chattel slavery, his views evolved from colonization to compensated emancipation to a constitutional amendment ending slavery through the diligence of freedom-seeking enslaved people and abolitionists.