It has been typical in the century and a half since the conclusion of the War Between the States that analysese tend to track contemporary concerns. The focus on the "civil rights" of American slaves really did not arise until the Second World War, when it behooved American academics to emphasize the cohesiveness and inclusiveness of American society by pretending that the issue of slavery was a civil rights issue. It was for a tiny, radicalized minority-- perhaps the Code Pinks of their day.
Seems to me that the real underlying issue, both of the War and of the Lincoln/Douglas slave expansion vs. limitation, was free labor. It was, in essence, an earlier version of the exact same issue which plagues us today-- the inability of free labor to compete effectively within a regime that fosters and floods labor markets with artificially cheap labor. This issue manifested in many ways, but the critical manifestion, it would appear, was the Dred Scott decision, which was a critical issue for Northern free labor, not civil rights advocates.
The issue, to free laboring Whites of the North, was simple. If, per Dred Scott, a Southerner could travel to the North with a collection of slave laborers, and work in agriculture or virtually any economic activity, the result would make it virtually impossible for free labor to compete. How could a family, with hired help, hope to out produce a single man with the ability to steal the labor value of any number of slaves? They couldn't.
Sound familiar? Is not that issue virtually the same issue we now face both with the importation of stressed labor (South Americans fleeing destitution at home and able to support their families back home on what are virtually slave labor pay rates) and the outsourcing of jobs (sending capital and technology to where labor is virtually free in comparison to American labor)?
This situation also explains why a peaceful solution, short of the utter abandonment of the Peculiar Institution, was impossible. Even if the South were to accept the prohibition of slavery in new territories (and thus, accept the ultimate shift in political power to the Free States as each territory gained reps and senators), the Southerners were free, with their own paramilitary forces (thing Blackwater, generalled by Stonewall Jackson and populated with mercenaries and private companies) to expand into South and Central America to create a virtual slave empire. Such an empire would, again, swamp and destroy free labor's ability to compete.
It is, therefore, a mixed bag when you try to approach the Lincoln position as a civil rights position. It was not. Therefore, his statements regarding the political rights, or lack thereof, of prospective freed Blacks are not particularly relevant to the points he was driving home. Lincoln and the farmers of Illinois didn't care that Blacks were owned, disenfranchized, bred and beaten like animals (per se-- they might have had moral compunctions about it but they were abstract issues that did not directly concern or motivate them.) They cared that by stealing the labor of Blacks, slave owners, like those who hire illegal aliens or outsource jobs, were making it impossible for them to make a decent living.
It took about a century, but the same forces who put up slave labor as the answer to maximizing profits have found their new hook, their new patsies. Patsies that, as of yet, have not learned to sing "Venceremos."
