I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.

Lincoln wrote this in 1864 amid the Civil War, when the moral and constitutional stakes of emancipation were being contested and his own antislavery convictions were under constant political scrutiny. The line comes from a private letter to Albert G. Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor, in which Lincoln explained how he balanced his personal abhorrence of slavery with what he believed were his constitutional duties as president. In the letter he defended the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure necessary to save the Union, while insisting that his opposition to slavery long predated the war and was rooted in moral intuition rather than partisan expediency.

The statement is Lincoln’s bluntest moral axiom about slavery: it is the benchmark by which moral reasoning is tested. By saying that if slavery is not wrong then nothing is wrong, he frames slavery as a self-evident injustice that undercuts any coherent ethical order. The final sentence—he cannot remember a time he did not think and feel this—presents antislavery not as a late-adopted policy position but as a durable element of character. In the larger argument of the Hodges letter, this moral certainty coexists with Lincoln’s pragmatic insistence that presidential action must be justified through constitutional authority and military necessity.