Friday, February 12, 2016
On Jon Stewart's Claim that Lincoln Didn't Emancipate the Slaves in the Border States Because He Didn't Want to Alienate the Inhabitants of Those States
What an ignoramus. As anybody who knows anything about the Civil War will inform you, the Union occupations of Missouri, Tennessee, and Maryland were characterized by some of the most virulent cruelty and worst human rights violations in the country's history; forced expulsions, arrests and imprisonments with zero charges, murders, theft and plunder on a enormous scale, homes and churches burnt to the ground, free-speech and freedom of the press all but outlawed (numerous newspapers in the border states were either closed or taken over by Unionists), etc.. To even hypothesize that this one extra "deprivation" (which if the North was truly motivated by racial justice should have been the first "property" taken) would have tipped the scales that had already been forced apart as far as possible is just plain ludicrous. Yeah, this Stewart fellow really needs to stick to pratfalls.
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It is commonly thought that the freeing of border state slaves would drive them
into the confederacy and that Lincoln wanted to avoid that. However, we note:
"Because it was issued under the President's war powers, it necessarily excluded areas not in rebellion - it applied to more than 3 million of the 4 million slaves at the time. The Proclamation was based on the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces; it was not a law passed by Congress."
As for brutality, we note it was widespread (Quantrill, shooting union negro troops,
hanging white abolutionists in the south, etc and the border states like Kentucky
and Missouri were the scene of much combat.
They couldn't have entered the Confederacy if they had wanted to (and they didn't until Abe declared war on the deep South) because they were a) occupied and b) disenfranchised.
And the Emancipation was strictly a military document in that his whole goal was to start a slave insurrection.
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