Anti-Blacks Like Lincoln When He Says...

I am sick and tired of people thinking of Abraham Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator". He is NOT! This was an essay question I had to do for American History this year. He is no way near a great emancipator. True, slavery was ended after his era, and he did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but what did that do? The Emancipation Proclamation did not do what many people think. It freed the slaves in the states in REBELLION. It did nothing for slaves on the Union's side. YES, there were slaves on the Union's side, in the border states. So how did this free slaves? Since the states in rebellion were no longer in the Union, they essentially were not states.

"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I ... am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." ---Abraham Lincoln..

.That sounds like a white supremacist to me.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.." ---Abraham Lincoln...

This shows that his intentions of fighting the South did NOT lie with abolishing slavery, but saving the Union. Even though Lincoln died in April of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery was not instituted until eight months later, nearly three years from his "slave freeing" Emancipation Proclamation.

by Ebonie

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well maybe I've read all the wrong books, but i

think this is an ahistorical view. from _America's History to 1877_, Henretta, et al., Dorsey Press, Chicago, 1987. [speaking here about the Lincoln-Douglas debates]

During the debates, Lincoln attacked slavery as an institution that subverted equality of opportunity along several fronts. He did express doubts about the inate abilities of blacks, and he explicitly rejected formulas that would give them social and political equality. But he declared that blacks were entitled to "all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence." This meant, Lincoln explained, that "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns," the black was "the equal of every living man."

and from my post of earlier today, Lincoln said:

All men are created equal - equal with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they (Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams) said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality... They mean simply to declare the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

The question one needs to ask is this: without Lincoln, could there have been a 13th amendment? There has long been a historical argument as to whether or not a slave-based economic system would have been viable in the long run. And there was clearly a growing political movement that centered largely on opposition to slavery, esp. in the North. So while it may be an oversimplification to say that Lincoln, by himself, ended slavery; and it may be correct to note that he did fail to surpass the *accepted doctrine* of his time (that the white "race" somehow represented the pinnacle of all creation), it is a gross and wrongful distortion to imply that he was an enemy to Black people in america. Even if he did not believe that the Black man was his equal, he still made it possible for that same man to demand equal treatment under the law.

duane

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I did some research on the subject in college. What I found out was that Lincoln was not really opposed to slavery so much as the history books make it seem. Firstly, if you read the EP, it says that the slaves in the *rebel* states were to be freed as of January of the following year if the US was still in a state of civil war. The slaves in the union states were not to be freed according to the document and nothing is mentioned about what would happen if the war ended before January. The EP made provisions for the slaves to join the Union army after their freedom - this is a strategic move to deplete the south of manpower. [it would be easier to run over states only populated by women, children and those too weak to fight once the slaves were gone.] The document states that the primary objective was to preserve the union - and nothing else.

Some other things were important to this "humnitarian" act of Abe's. The EP was issued five days after the Antiem, Geo. Union victory. Abolitionists wanted to the slaves to be voluntarily freed by slave owners and they were putting political pressure on Lincoln to enact legislature. In his 1860 platform as the republican candidate for presidency he stated a "gradual and compensatory" emancipation. That would basically give masters about 10 years to decide what to do and the government would pay ea. owner about $300 for each slave with an additional amount of about $100,00 if the slave would leave the US and go to Haiti or Liberia. In 1862 Abe had congress adopt a "financial aid" plan for this plan and intended to issue gov't bonds instead of cash. He thought that freed slaves should have their own colony and that part of their freedom would include their subsequent emigration. He invited some prominent freed blacks to the white house once and said, [and I only know this because I have the quote hanging up on my office bulletin board]

"Your race suffers greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated." - From John Hope Franklin's book, "From Slavery to Freedom"

Back to the EP, the document states that it was a military necessity and that the decree did not maintain an anti-slavery principle. It was also a tool to get financial backing from some European countries that had already abandoned slavery. Abe opposed the EP in the beginning of his term saying that the constitution didn't give the power to enforce it in rebel states. What happened is that Union generals started freeing slaves all over the place and Abe got mad. A general in Missouri made a military proclamation that all slaves in the state were free and Lincoln gave an executive order to reverse that! He did not want to alienate slave-holding union states.

Nothing I read ever came out and said Abe was a racist but it did say that he didn't really want to free the slaves and that the fighting was a state vs. union "rights" issue and the EP was a tool to ensure victory at a time when it seemed the north was gaining an upper hand in the war. I hope this answers your question.

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