Jacoby wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Jacoby wrote:
What Lincoln personally believed is pretty muddied, it is clear that he thought whites were superior to blacks and wasn't against the preservation of slavery in the South. He recognized slavery as a legal institution and thought slave owners were entitled to property rights, thus supporting fugitive slave laws. Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment which was a last ditch effort to stop secession, the unrepealable Corwin Amendment would of permanently enshrined slavery in our constitution. The text being...
"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
As I'm sure you know, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the territories held by the Confederacy while slavery and fugitive slave laws continued in the Union until the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments after the war. The purpose of Emancipation Proclamation was specifically use to try spark riots and slave rebellion in the South and to make it more difficult for any European country to support the Confederacy.
Lincoln, a 19th century white man, was RACIST!?!? Oh Lordy, he must have stood out like a sore thumb (sarcasm). C'mon, you can do better than that! That's like trying to take Martin Luther to task for being a 16th century European who was Antisemitic. The important thing to remember about Lincoln was that in the end, he did the right thing. No one can say that ending slavery was possibly wrong.
Of course ending slavery was right but the means matter to me, noble ends don't justify wicked acts. What I am arguing is that waging a war against the seceding states was wrong and that slavery as it existed in the south at the time was in its dying breaths and couldn't have existed much longer. Slavery in Brazil was much more widespread than in the US and that was ended peacefully by 1888 so the question is when would it have ended here and I don't see any reason why it would of lasted much longer here than it did elsewhere in the western world.
People in this country have such a distorted view Lincoln, he was probably the most despised president in American history in his time so this 20th century deification of him "saving the union" and "freeing the slaves" are modern inventions. He trampled our constitution, he acted as a despot, he waged an unnecessary war against the American people that ended up killing what would the equivalent of 8-9 million Americans now as far as the % of population. He destroyed the south so completely that the scars of the Union invasion can still be seen, race relations were way worse for the 100 years following the Civil War than it was proceeding it
No, the notions that Lincoln saved the Union, and freed the slaves are not modern inventions. While it's absolutely true that he was very reviled in his lifetime, almost immediately after he was shot, clergymen who probably had preached against him in the pulpit the previous Sunday, were now eulogizing him as almost a second Christ for his accomplishments. Newspapers all over the north recognized his accomplishments. The people of the north mourned openly at his passing, especially blacks, who feared what their fate would be without their benefactor. So, no, it goes a long ways back.
And who says the means to ending slavery was at all wicked? The Confederacy tried to rip the Union apart, and Lincoln retaliated - end of story. No government is going to idly sit by and let their country be ripped asunder for any reason. Lincoln had sworn an oath to defend the nation against enemies both foreign and domestic, and the Confederacy essentially fit both.
You're entering another argument about secession, the right of secession being the right self determination which all people have. When our country was founded it was a voluntary association of 13 sovereign independent states, this notion was destroyed by Lincoln. This was not the first time secession was seriously talked about, New England almost seceded during the War of 1812 and South Carolina threatened it during the Nullification crisis during Andrew Jackson's presidency. Secession does not justify despotism, it does not justify invasion, it does not justify terror. I feel I am very consistent with my belief in self-determination, it seems too often that the notion is just used as a rhetorical tool to use in our grand chess game and completely ignored when it doesn't serve our interests as it we've done with Ukraine.
29 Jun 2015, 7:08 pm
