Such an approach to reform was diametrically opposed to Lincoln’s. In a temperance address delivered in 1842, he criticized hectoring crusaders: “It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Previous temperance efforts had failed, Lincoln said, because they were led by “Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents” whose lack of “approachability” proved “fatal to their success.” They “are supposed to have no sympathy of feeling or interest, with those very persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.” They indulged in “[t]oo much denunciation against dram sellers and dram-drinkers,” a strategy that was “impolitic, because, it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to any thing; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own business; and least of all, where such driving is to be submitted to, at the expense of pecuniary interest, or burning appetite.” To expect denunciation to bring about reform “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed. When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.” During the Civil War, Lincoln bemoaned what he called the “self-righteousness of the Abolitionists” and “the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.” He doubtless felt the same way about some abolitionists of the 1830s, whose vituperative, intolerant style alienated potential recruits to their worthy cause. In fact, Lincoln may have been trying to persuade abolitionists to exercise more tact. Clearly, the abolition of slavery was on his mind, for in the peroration of this temperance address appeared a seeming non sequitur: “When the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birth-place and cradle of both those revolutions, that shall have ended in that victory.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃