Lincoln did not mention slavery directly by name in the Gettysburg Address, however, he invoked the language of The Declaration of Independence with the purpose of contextualizing the Civil War and the struggle to maintain the Union as a struggle for the very same liberty and equality fought for in the Revolutionary War. His opening lines read,
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.(Bliss Copy)
Slavery was a threat to the Union, having caused the southern states to secede, and as such, Lincoln approached the issue cautiously, slowly changing his policies over time. His primary concern was maintaining the Union in many of his policies, but in the Gettysburg Address, you could say that he defines that Union and why it is worth defending. It is important to remember when writing about the Gettysburg Address that when Lincoln delivered his historic speech on November 19, 1863, despite the Battle of Gettysburg having taken place 3 months early from July 1-3, 1863, there were still soldiers among the 7,786 dead who remained unburied (Death and the Civil War, 2012).
Lincoln's cabinet, a "team of rivals" held many different opinions on the issue of slavery, some held that emancipation should be an objective of the war, others believed it would be possible and even preferable to repair the union while allowing the institution of slavery to persist. Lincoln, for his part, was committed to the legislatorial process, which is slow with an emphasis on compromise. His hero and the politician he tried most to emulate was Henry Clay, nicknamed The Great Compromiser. Lincoln's evolving policies on slavery can be seen in three distinct acts.
The first act comes at the start of the war on August 30th, 1861. General John C. Fremont, a radical Republican who believed emancipation should be an official objective of the war, issued a proclamation declaring martial law and emancipating all people enslaved in Missouri. Lincoln wrote him privately, asking that he change his proclamation to be more in line with "An act to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes,” approved by Congress on August, 6th, 1861. Lincoln softened his request by stating that his request came from a place of caution rather than censure, however, Fremont refused to change his proclamation sending a letter to Lincoln that stated,
If upon reflection, your better judgement still decides that I am wrong in the article respecting the liberation of slaves I have to ask that you will openly direct me to make the correction. The implied censure will be recived [sic] by me as a soldier always should the reprimand of his chief. If I were to retract of my own accord it would imply that I myself thought it wrong and that I had acted without the reflection which the gravity of the point demanded. But I did not do so. I acted with full deliberation and upon the certain conviction that it was a measure right and necessary, and I think so still. (September 8, 1861)
Receiving the letter on the 10th, Lincoln wasted no time in issuing a public censure on September 11th. Lincoln opposed Fremont's proclamation because he viewed it as a political act rather than one based in the military need. The August 6th act approved by Congress was much more moderate by only emancipating enslaved people held in bondage by rebels and employed in service to the Confederacy, whereas Fremont's proclamation emancipated all of the enslaved people in Missouri. There was a lot of pressure put on Lincoln by other commanders and politicians in other border states, who feared that Fremont's proclamation threatened their own human "property." Lincoln needed to keep the border states and feared that emancipating border state slaves would push border states to the Confederacy. Two months after Fremont's proclamation, Lincoln relieved him of his command. Read excerpts from more primary documents and commentary from various historians on this incident here: John C. Fremont and Missouri, sponsored by the Lehrman Institute.
The second act showing how Lincoln considered addressing slavery is the Compensated Emancipation Act approved by Congress and then signed by President Lincoln on April 16, 1862. The act was similar to a proposition that Lincoln had made in 1849 to achieve emancipation gradually through compensated volunteer slaveholders. The act gave immediate freedom to all enslaved people in the District of Columbia and gave their slaveholders 90 days to file a petition for compensation, which would amount to 1/3 of market value. Dr. Kenneth Winkle, Civil War historian, wrote
During the three-month process, 966 slaveowners filed petitions and testified before the commission. They had to present their slaves for examination or, if the slaves were fugitives, produce witnesses who could testify to the personal characteristics of the slaves. The commissioners approved ninety-four percent of the petitions and provided compensation for 2,981 slaves. They considered 111 slaves too young, too aged, or too infirm to merit compensation, so their freedom was uncompensated. A relative handful of petitions were declined because the ownership of the slaves was questionable, the slaveowners were considered disloyal, or the slaves had run away more than two years earlier. All told, just under 3,100 slaves received their freedom. Most of the former slaves left their owners immediately and found work in Washington, where the wartime demand for labor was ample, moved to the North to join long-established African Americans communities, or went to work for the Union Army or, later, served as soldiers and sailors. By the end of the decade, 70 percent of them had left Washington.
More than 150 slaveowners did not request compensation for their slaves, typically because they were openly disloyal to the Union, they lived in Maryland while their slaves lived in the District of Columbia, or their slaves were fugitives living in Washington. At Lincoln's urging, on June 12, 1862, Congress approved a "supplemental act" that allowed all of those slaves to file petitions for their own freedom. (Emancipation Petitions: Historical Contexts)
You can explore these petitions, letters, newspapers, medical cases, as well as, look at maps and visual works in the rich digital archive Civil War Washington, directed by Susan C. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lorang, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle, and published by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Lincoln opposed an immediate emancipation by John C. Fremont in 1861, but by 1862 was urging Congress to issue an act that gave immediate emancipation to enslaved people living in a certain area, whether or not their slaveholders were loyal to the Union. Lincoln has either evolved past his original policy of military need or expanded his definition of military need. However, Lincoln's pull to compromise is still present in the compensation portion of the act. The August 6th, 1861 "confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes” act and the April 16th, 1862 Compensated Emancipation Act both treat enslaved people like property. In 1861, enslaved people are "contraband" or property seized by the military in conflict. In 1862, Lincoln is concerned with compensating the slaveholders for their loss in property, not the enslaved person, who had their labor stolen from them since birth. Emancipating people under the guise of recognizing them as property appeased the border states who expected their use of slavery to still be respected by the Union they had stayed loyal to. However, Lincoln is also concerned with emancipation as can be seen in his push for a second act to allow enslaved people held in bondage by rebels to petition for freedom as well. This second act also shows that Lincoln was expanding the contraband policies of 1861, by testing the waters of mass, but measured (only 84% of these petitions were granted) emancipation in D.C., sandwiched between the border state of Maryland and Confederate Virginia.
The third act is perhaps the most famous, Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1st, 1863. This act emancipated and recognized the freedom of every person held in bondage in the rebellious states. In a departure from the previous acts where enslaved people were legally treated like property, this act centers the humanity of the enslaved. However, in this act, Lincoln continues his compromise with the border states by allowing slavery to persist in states still loyal to the Union. Lincoln also did not seek Congressional approval for this proclamation, issuing it as an act of war by the commander chief, applying to the rebellious states. Lincoln did much to expand the executive powers during times of war, read Lincoln's Code by Dr. John Fabian Witt for more. The third dragging year of what was supposed to be a quick conflict clearly shaped Lincoln's policies concerning slavery and the war. In the proclamation he declares,
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. (January 1, 1863)
Until, the middle of 1862 and the Emancipation Proclamation, black people had not been allowed to enlist in the Union's service. The conflict, lasting much longer than expected and not quickly resolved through compromise, pushed Lincoln (who believed that citizenship, military service, and voting rights should come at once and not staggered), to allow for black people to enlist before the Fourteenth Amendment granted them citizenship after the Civil War had ended. Lincoln bending on this issue is typical of a man who admires compromise, but also evidence of the brutal nature of the conflict and Lincoln's desire to end it. Lincoln saw slavery as a threat, and used language so no one could accuse him of inciting insurrections, urging people to "abstain from all violence...", but he also finally saw enslaved people as potential soldiers who could help win the war. By the end of the war, 179,000 black men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army making up 10% of the Union Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy (Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military during the Civil War, 2017.)
Then in November 1863, Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Through allusion, Lincoln depicted slavery as the central conflict of moral war by evoking the Declaration of Independence and redefining the Union as a "government of the people, for the people, and by the people..." Up to this point, Lincoln had addressed the threat of slavery in a variety of ways over time, with special consideration to the border states, compromise, and military need. Slavery was a threat to the Union and while some like Fremont wanted to address it with immediate and mass emancipation, others like secretary of state Seward wanted to compromise and allow its continued existence. Lincoln navigated a political landscape that was so extremely divided on the topic of slavery it had literally fractured the Union-- and he did so with a purpose to repair all aspects of that Union, willing to change his tactics over time to serve that purpose.
President Lincoln does not directly reference slavery in the Gettysburg Address. He alludes to it when he speaks of the United States as a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." If all men are created equal, it stands to reason that slavery cannot coexist with the principles upon which the United States was founded.
Lincoln also implies that it is his intention to see slavery abolished in the United States. He states,
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced . . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Assuming that the unfinished work is the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery—as evidenced by the phrase a "new birth of freedom"—it can be deduced that Lincoln was proclaiming his commitment to ending slavery.
I think there can be no doubt that Lincoln viewed slavery as a moral evil. As for whether he saw it as a threat, I think that depends on how "threat" is defined. Lincoln was certainly a devout man of faith and character; however, he was also a very pragmatic man. Since he saw slavery as a moral evil—he denounced it on many occasions both before and during his presidency—he certainly saw it as a threat to the moral integrity of the nation. However, Lincoln was not an abolitionist until well into the Civil War.
Lincoln initially believed that slavery could not be constitutionally (and legally) ended without the cooperation of the slave states. He was resolutely opposed to the expansion of slavery into the western territories, and he supported the prosecution of slave smugglers (the importation of slaves had been abolished in 1808), but he did not actively pursue the end of slavery until the Civil War was well underway and it was apparent that no peaceful solution to Southern secession could be found. As he was willing to let slavery end naturally over time, you could say that he did not see it as an immediate threat to the well-being of the nation.
Lincoln's views on slavery also changed a great deal over the course of his political career. Early on, Lincoln was against ending slavery by force and was against establishing African Americans as the legal and social equals of whites. By the end of the Civil War, however, Lincoln actively supported the 13th Amendment (to abolish slavery) and was in favor of voting rights for African American men who had served as Union soldiers. As Lincoln had already issued the Emancipation Proclamation several months before the Gettysburg Address, one can assume that at the time of the Gettysburg Address, he was committed to ending slavery in the near future rather than letting nature take its course. Clearly, he viewed slavery as a greater threat to the well-being of the nation as the war raged on.
For further reading, see this source.
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-slavery/
https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcript.htm
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm
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