The use of the word 'abolitionist' to refer to all people opposed to slavery is something of a modern anachronism, one heavily influenced by commemoration of the great focus we place on the story of the abolition of the slave trade by the United States and Britain in the early 19th century, but the actual term does not simply mean someone who was opposed to slavery.

In the history of the transatlantic slave trade, historians - and many contemporaries - distinguish between two major conventional ways of opposing slavery. Abolitionism generally refers to the position that slavery was not only wrong and needed to be done away with, but that it should be abolished as a matter of urgency and expediency - i.e., immediately, totally and as soon as humanly possible. Although not uniformly, a number of abolitionists tended to also be motivated in part or in whole by unease at the racial hierarchy on which slavery was founded, and were more likely to favour measures and legal changes that would expand and protect the rights of free African Americans alongside and after slavery's abolition. Thaddeus Stevens, the prominent Republican Congressman who many people now know of again through Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal in the movie Lincoln a few years, was an example of someone who was a committed and radical abolitionist: he opposed racial discrimination in citizenship and voting; campaigned for slaveowner land to be 'nationalised', divided up and then redistributed to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War; lead federal investigations into the murder of African Americans and sympathetic whites by racists in the South; and was very critical, though generally reluctantly supportive when he lost the argument, of measures he did not think went far enough in providing economically and socially for the security of African Americans post-emancipation (and for what it's worth, historians generally agree that, whatever the political realities were, Stevens was right). Men like Stevens were widely held up at the time as examples of a dangerous, radical kind of opposition to slavery.

Much, much more common in the United States was simple anti-slavery sentiment. Many people who wanted to see an end to slavery held complicated views about it. They ranged from those who were committed white supremacists who whole-heartedly believed in the inherent inferiority of black people to white people but who nonetheless took the view that slavery was such a terrible evil it was wrong even to subject (as they saw it) an inferior race to it; often, these kind of anti-slavery thinkers and activists were deeply concerned with the traumatising effect that slavery had on the moral character of white society rather than the black victims of the institution. Whilst this was a very important and valid point to make - as the current South African President Cyril Ramaphosa once said of the white men and women who violently enforced apartheid, "they also needed to be freed from this prison that their history had locked them into" - it was not in the progressive spirit of truth and reconciliation that they took this view. Many anti-slavery activists believed slavery could only end if steps were taken to secure total racial segregation; the modern-day country of Liberia began its life as an attempted colony in West Africa where its white financial backers believed one day, perhaps, all African Americans could be deported so the United States could be an all-white (Native Americans obviously never factoring into these conversations) society. Other anti-slavery activists were more modest in their racism, believing that one day a post-racial society might be possible, but not right now, taking the view that people of African-descent would need time to 'civilise' before that could happen. Yet others were simple political or economic pragmatists: they opposed slavery and wished to gradually regulate it out of existence but could not countenance the perceived economic or political chaos doing so immediately would cause. For some race barely factored into it at all, at least consciously: there were some who conceived of anti-slavery as a kind of proto-class struggle to improve the working conditions of all people, black and white, slave or free. Anti-slavery activists almost invariably opposed the idea of immediate emancipation of all enslaved people for one reason or another, however, and often favoured long-term solutions to America's horrific racial divide that would now be firmly and unconditionally understood as coming from a place of deep racial prejudice.

It is worth noting that there was also a kind of psuedo anti-slavery that was popular among slaveowners (yes, you read that right) prior to the 19th century. It was only really in the latter decades of Southern slavery that it became popular to defend slavery as morally good and justifiable; often, early pro-slavery sentiment is dressed up in recognition that the institution of slavery is unpleasant or even morally wrong, but defended on the base that it is either part of a higher morality ordained by God; a necessary evil as the result of the course of human events that cannot be undone; or something which is ultimately evil in the short-term but which will produce long-term goodness for all involved. This latter position was the one embodied by Robert E. Lee which Confederate apologists dress up or mistake as true anti-slavery: he took the view that one day, racial equality would be possible, but that African people and their descendants were currently inferior and slavery was God's plan for 'conditioning' them for freedom. Conveniently for Mr Lee, he expected this process to take perhaps several thousand years. Thomas Jefferson is, however, the most famous and archetypical advocate of this brand of false anti-slavery thinking. Jefferson was an enthusiastic slave owner who nonetheless wrote at length on why slavery was ultimately morally wrong, but constructed an elaborate system of defences and justifications to reconcile his support of the institution with his recognition that it could not possibly be right to own other human beings as property.

Abraham Lincoln was not, for his part, an abolitionist for most of his political career. But he was - as was increasingly common by the mid-19th century - an anti-slavery politician whose opposition to the institution was firmly rooted in moral grounds. Prior to becoming President Lincoln was unequivocal in establishing he saw the institution of slavery as an immense moral injustice and a stain on the American Republic, and in his firm belief that African Americans enjoyed the right to life and liberty on part with white people. But he was not a champion of racial equality or outright abolition, either. It is difficult for us to unpick the exact beliefs of a man like Lincoln who lived his life so much in the public eye and in the political arena where the lines between fact and fiction all too often blur for reasons both noble and malicious, the pattern that emerges from Lincoln's life and encounters is generally one of a man who was undoubtedly prejudiced against African American people, but perhaps also sufficiently aware of himself and the condition of American society to be at least somewhat uncomfortable about that prejudice. Frederick Douglass described Lincoln as such: a man who undoubtedly had racist views and thoughts about black people, but who did not carry himself in that way in his dealings with African American individuals and communities, and who genuinely and absolutely detested slavery for its impact on both white and black.

Lincoln for his part was convinced for most of his life that the only way slavery would end in the United States was if some kind of arrangement could be reached with Southern slaveowners for the federal government to compensate them for the loss of their human property - a position which legitimised the notion that enslaved people had truly been owned as commodities to be bought and sold. Lincoln was also pessimistic about the prospect of white people and black people being able to live side-by-side, and rather than taking the view that this meant work must be done to end racial prejudice among white people, believed it would be best for African Americans to leave the United States and build their own nation or nations apart from white people, although he thought this should be encouraged and not forced. He also believed the sheer strength of anti-black racism warned in general of a deterioration in the moral fibre of the United States that would lead in time to the loss of civil rights for white people, as well, based on characteristics like religious faith or place of birth (although it would be right to point that, in the 19th century, the vast majority of Americans were not afforded civil liberties and human rights as we know them today). All in all Lincoln wanted to win the argument on slavery through the democratic process and achieve its end in a way which, above all else, preserved the constitutional and moral integrity of the United States. This latter cause took precedent for Lincoln, even if that meant prolonging slavery's existence, and he was willing to be a pragmatic politician and pick his battles - like focusing on attempting to curtail the growth of slavery in the future states in the West, or protecting southern slaveowners from economic hardship or loss through emancipation - to achieve his goals. And whilst he sincerely believed all people regardless of race had the right to life and to be free from enslavement, this belief did not extend to the automatic belief in universal suffrage, although that may well have changed if he had lived to see the struggle to ratify the 14th Amendment. But this position which seems so contradictory to our modern expectations, and to our morally embellished view of 'Honest Abe', was, in fact, perfectly mainstream and pragmatic for his time.