He proposed that the exiting fugitive-slave law should be repealed and another be substituted guaranteeing the right of habeas corpus and jury trial to the fugitive, thus advocating what would at one stroke quiet all agitation in the North by effectually providing that no fugitives would ever again be returned. ... Now that the antislavery forces were coming into control of the federal government, at the first opportunity Lincoln suggested the full use of their new power to settle the question to their complete satisfaction.
Dumond says, thirdly, that Lincoln from the start of his Presidency assumed a view of national government like that first asserted by Andrew Jackson, in which the supremacy of the federal government was unquestioned (although he never disputed that states had certain proper spheres of action of their own). Known in the disputes over slavery as "consolidation," he argues that of Lincoln's view of national power: "It was a species of consolidation doctrine such as no man in public life had ever before uttered and such as only the most extreme consolidationist could possibly endorse. Put into practical effect it would remove all limis to antislavery legislation."
Finally, Dumond argues that Lincoln had a clear view that emancipation would be a necessary result of the Slave Power's secession. During the prewar struggles over slavery in the territories, Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery, in the hope common to abolitionists that with slavery restricted from expanding to new states, as he himself put it in 1856, "the hateful institution, like a reptile poisoning itself, will perish by its own infamy."
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