Monday, March 17, 2014
On Lincoln, Slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is one of the biggest jokes in American history. a) It wasn't penned until the war was well into its second year and b) it didn't free a single solitary slave. Yep, that's right, folks, the document only claimed to emancipate slaves from the Confederate territories and, if anything, it codified the institution in other places (in the Northern and border slave states such as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, counties of West Virginia, and even in those parts of the Confederacy which at that point were under Union control; sections of Louisiana, for instance). And even in the Confederacy, those states and localities would have also been exempt if in fact they had returned to the Union by January 1, 1863!!!...............................................................................So, if the document wasn't for a humanitarian cause, what then? A lot of (non-Lincoln worshiping) scholars have concluded that (especially being that the document was written when it looked like the South was winning) it was written essentially for two purposes, both quite inflammatory; a) to incite a series of slave revolts that would take a lot of the Confederate soldiers off the front and b) to replenish their own depleted forces with freed slaves. Now, obviously the slaves eventually were set free after the war but to say that this was the primary aim of Lincoln and this little document of his is false and I believe that I've proven that.
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4 comments:
Can one make the argument that the document put an exclamation point after... "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
Just food for thought. You know my philosophical and political thoughts on this issue.
BTW, forgive the partial quote if not entirely accurate. I quoted from memory.
We note that on Christmas Eve, 1860, the South Carolina legislature enacted their secession, the document claiming
" A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction." We conclude they left the union because they
felt their concept of other humans as livestock like cattle, horses, chickens: their property,
was moral in their eyes. Hence, they confiscated US equipment, arms and fortifications in their
state, fired the first round in the Civil War, and received the
harshest of Sherman's march to the sea. There are some who still argue that they were right
and moral to do so; I would suggest not.
Actually it was the North that broke the truce first by fortifying the garrison and evidently these Southerners never actually listened to Mr. Lincoln speak during his first inaugural in which he stated that he was prepared to do NOTHING about slavery in the territories in which it already existed.......And you are aware that Lincoln's ultimate plan (right up to his dying day) was to take all of the black people and ship them back to Africa (where no doubt thousands would have died in transport)?
"If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil."
from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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