Yes, very much so. While I normally wouldn't link to a video, in this case, I'll make an exception because it's short and spoken by one of the foremost Civil War scholars of the past half century. Here you will see Eric Foner succinctly explain Abraham Lincoln's views on slavery. Lincoln was always in the anti-slavery camp, but as Lincoln went through life, and especially during the Civil War, he moved along the spectrum of anti-slavery. By the end of his life, he was an immediate abolitionist, which was seen as the most extreme position pre-war.

But does that mean he was in any way OK with slavery before the war? No, not really. But he was willing to appease the South. As was widely understood before the war, slavery was sanctioned by the Constitution, so there wasn't any way to abolish it nationwide short of a Constitutional amendment, an insurmountable hurdle in 1861. Rather than taking on the slavery issue from that angle, Lincoln's position was to end its westward expansion and end its enforcement in so-called "free" states in the North and west.

But these steps were always meant to be the first steps toward the ultimate objective, which was an end to slavery nationwide in the United States. Lincoln always kept his eye on that ball, but by his own admission, he believed that the achievement of that goal was decades, if not a century off. The important thing was, in the 1850s and 60s, was to reverse course and contain slavery, because over the preceding decade, ever since the Compromise of 1850, slavery protections had been expanding, not receding.

In his public speeches, Lincoln routinely "dog-whistled" about this. The South quite often paraphrased Lincoln's public statements when making their case for secession, and accused him of having the illegitimate, unconstitutional, and tyrannical goal of ending slavery outright through Presidential executive action. Lincoln always denied this, and was quite open about saying that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed (as he said in his First Inaugural Address). But in a way, the South was right. Lincoln did want to set the U.S. on a path toward abolition. But he was content to do so at a leisurely pace, except when it came to the western territories. There, he wanted it ended before it could begin. Everywhere else, he seemed to not have much optimism that it would be a realistic possibility within his presidency.

I'll give three examples. The most famous is his "House Divided" speech from June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand.

"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

"Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South...

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.

"To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty, is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.

"This is what we have to do."

I skipped over a bunch in the middle, but the whole point of the speech is that he foresees the U.S. being entirely a slave country eventually unless the spread of slavery is stopped. So he believes it is imperative for anti-slavery Americans to set the country on the path where slavery reaches its "ultimate extinction". This phrase would often be repeated by secessionists on the eve of the Civil War, as they believed it was Lincoln's true intent.

More succinctly, in a speech in Chicago on February 11, 1859, he told his audience:

"Never forget that we have before us this whole matter of the right or wrong of slavery in this Union, though the immediate question is as to its spreading out into new Territories and States."

Again, here it can be seen that Lincoln's immediate goal is to end the expansion of slavery westward. But he's dog-whistling to his audience that this is just the first step. He would talk again about the right and wrong of slavery in his First Inaugural Address. He believed it was wrong. He wanted it to end. But that could only be accomplished one step at a time, and the first step was to end the prospect of any new slave states.

On August 22, 1862, he sent a letter to the New York Tribune in response to the paper's call that Lincoln begin the process of emancipation. This letter is often disingenuously cited by Neo-Confederates as Lincoln's "true" feelings and intentions, because the bulk of the letter is saying that his intent is to preserve the Union and that his policy toward slavery is predicated on that goal. But Neo-Confederates usually omit the last line, which is:

"I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

It's pretty clear how he felt about slavery. Personally, he was against it. As President, his oath of office meant that his duty was to preserve the Union, first and foremost.

As he mentions there, he made similar statements throughout his political career, including in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Remember that Lincoln was a politician trying to get elected to office when the vast majority of the electorate were white supremacists to one degree or another. There really isn't any question that Abraham Lincoln was against slavery his whole adult life. The only question is, what measures he would personally take to end slavery. As Foner says, he evolved on the issue. But even within that, his evolution always started out as being anti-slavery and just got more and more anti-slavery throughout his political career. He was very adept at calculating when he had the political cover of making moves against slavery. Whenever he could, he would. And by the end of his presidency, the unthinkable had happened: a Constitutional Amendment ending slavery outright had been ratified in Congress and was winding its way through the states. It wasn't something he thought he'd be in a position to do four years earlier, but once he recognized he was, he moved toward the goal without hesitation.

One last thing to point out. In the book Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession by Russell A. McClintock, the author details all the "compromise"/appeasement negotiations between North and South during Lincoln's President-Elect period. As it went on and states began seceding, there were some conservative Republicans who began to back off the party's central plank of preventing any new slave states from being admitted into the Union. This even came from some surprising places. William Seward, who would be Lincoln's Secretary of State, had given the other most famous pre-war anti-slavery speech ("The Irrepressible Conflict") that the South cited in their secession speeches. Seward had been the frontrunner for the 1860 Republican nomination, but he was thought to be too far left and too outspoken to get elected, unlike Lincoln who was seen as more moderate. So while there did continue to be a robust left-wing of the party during the Secession Crisis, there were a bunch of Republicans who got cold feet and were willing to modify their principles to avoid war.

Lincoln tried to stay out of it before his inauguration, but eventually, he was asked to weigh in by Republicans looking for some guidance, some united vision. His advice was basically: the end of slavery's westward expansion is non-negotiable. Negotiations on other issues might be permissible, but not slavery's expansion. Not only out of principle, but also because he thought it would kill the party since their voters would abandon them. It is clear from everything he did and said, the ultimate end of slavery was his vision for the future of the United States. It was just a matter of what political steps needed to be taken to best achieve that goal, which, before the war started, seemed to be a political impossibility in the near-term.

SOURCES:

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner

Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery by Richard Striner

Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race by George M. Fredrickson

Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment ed. by Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner

Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession by Russell A. McClintock