First off, let me state my view on how
the races/ethnicities relate to each other. Initially, all of the
ethnic groups saw each other the way that the US Navy and the Marines
do today, the “squids” are lazy and disorganized, the “jarheads”
are not so bright, but when we're down to brass tacks, when our backs
are to the wall, we're all Americans, we get our instructions from
the same Commander-in-Chief and both branches serve the same country.
We'll never occupy a world where there's no friction or conflict between the ethnicities, but in the Western world, in the early 1500s, that relatively comfortable situation changed with the
introduction of Western technology. It went to the heads of Western
white people, who began to think of themselves as Übermensch.
Around 1950, the Nazis had taken the theory of the racial supermen to
its logical and horrifying conclusion and the colonies that Europe
acquired demanded to be free of direct Western control. Westerners
began to lose the conviction that they were humanity's supermen. So,
when a white person becomes a non-racist, he's not so much moving
forwards to enlightenment as he is simply returning to ancient norms,
which is why children are not naturally racist. Their racism has to
be taught.
Lincoln was very much a man of his time
and still retained a feeling that white people were essentially
superior to black people. Fortunately, he also felt that Africans had
suffered enormously under the boots of white Americans and that the
imposition of that suffering was fundamentally immoral. Eventually,
he felt near his final days that the political spectrum of his day,
with white supremacists feeling that the slave system was just fine
and needed no alterations, the centrist middle-of-the-roaders who
felt that slave-owners should exercise responsibility and
self-control (The idea of commercial regulations was still a few
decades in the future) to the wild extremist abolitionists who were
radical lefties.
As Lincoln's thought on the subject
progressed, he found himself more and more in agreement with what the
TV commenter Bill O'Reilly would call “the far left” on the
subject.
As to the piece “
Lincoln,
lies and Black folk” (I have not, as of this writing, watched
the Steven Spielberg film,
Lincoln)
was the Civil War fought for the benefit of the Africans who had been
dragged against their will to America? Before and early in the war,
Lincoln made his feelings on that subject quite clear, he wanted to
preserve the Union whether the Africans were freed or not. Was the
fate of the Africans then irrelevant? No, their plight touched
sympathetic chords within white people in the North and as the Civil
War progressed, rescuing the blacks from their fate was seen as a
fine and noble cause and it inspired many Northerners to great
efforts.
We deem our cause most holy,
We know we're in the right,
And twenty million freemen
Stand ready for the fight.
Our pride is fair Columbia,
No stain her beauty mars,
On her we'll raise the brave old flag
That bears the stripes and stars.
Preserving the Union was a fairly abstract goal, white people
supported it, but rescuing the Africans in America from their fate as
it was outlined in “
Uncle
Tom's Cabin” was an inspiring goal that was worth a lot of
bloodshed.
What was the essential cause of the
Civil War? Lincoln
wisely
stated:
A house divided
against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union
to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or
all the other.
Not sure how completely Lincoln
understood the issue here (though he states the problem quite well),
but America had two economies, the North was a rising industrial,
capitalist power, the South was a Medieval-style, feudalistic source
of raw materials. What was the essential difference between the two
regions? Slavery. Without chattel slavery (Very different and far
crueler than slavery in Biblical times and in South America at the
same time), a feudalistic system where very few people owned lots and
lots of land was simply impossible to sustain. The only way to
sustain a Medieval-type system was to have people in bondage, chained
to the land. So yes, without slavery, the South would have been
economically indistinguishable from the North. To strike at slavery
was to strike at the essentially feudal system of the South.
Did white Americans fight for “free
black people”? Ultimately, yes. In order to break the feudal system
of the South, the slaves had to be freed. Was that the deliberate,
conscious intent of white people in the North? I suspect the Radical
Republicans understood the connection at the time, but I doubt many
other people truly understood that.
What was the effect of the Emancipation
Proclamation? Wikipedia says that 50,000 slaves were freed
immediately by the Proclamation as that was the number of black
people living within the Federally-occupied areas of the states that
were in rebellion when the Proclamation was issued. In the following
paragraph about the
Hampton
Roads Peace Conference, that number had increased to 200,000 as
the Conference occurred much later in the war.
This discussion led into the overarching issue of emancipation and
the status of blacks in the South. Lincoln, in response to an inquiry
by Stephens, indicated that opinions in Washington differed as to the
"operation" of the Emancipation Proclamation, particularly
after hostilities had ceased and it could no longer be considered a
war measure. Some people, he said, believed that it was not operative
at all; others, that it applied only to federal-occupied areas; and
still others, that it applied to all of the Southern states listed in
the proclamation. Seward pointed out that about two hundred thousand
slaves had already been freed under the authority of the
proclamation, an estimate with which Lincoln agreed. The issue of the
Emancipation Proclamation's legality, Lincoln told the Confederate
commissioners, would be decided by the courts after the war.
Meanwhile, he reminded them, he would not retract or modify any of
the proclamation.
Also,
Though "the
abandonment of armed resistance to the national authority [was] the
only indispensable condition to ending the war," the
president made it clear that he would not "retract or modify the
emancipation proclamation, nor ... return to slavery any person who
is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts
of Congress." (emphases added)
Yes, Lincoln put the preservation of
the Union first in his short list of demands, but very clearly, black
emancipation was a close and very important second.
“Lincoln,
lies and Black folk” goes on to claim:
In 1861, when
General John C. Fremont freed all slaves in the state of Missouri,
Lincoln fired him. When General David Hunter freed the slaves in
three states, Lincoln cancelled and reversed the order.
Yes, clearly these early attempts at
emancipation were premature and occurred before Lincoln decided that
freeing the slaves was a necessary precondition for ending the war.
Lincoln needed the loyalty of the border states and he felt that
taking away slaves
before
slave-holders were ready to give them up would damage the war
effort, so he rhetorically concentrated on “Preserving the Union”
as his announced motivation for pursuing the war. Was this the act
“of a Saviour or of a Salvation Army”? Obviously not, but it was
clearly the act of a politicians trying to balance competing demands,
to pursue a war of liberation while asserting that liberation was not
his goal at all,
Was Lincoln a “hero for the Black
man”? Certainly in the long run, for African-Americans to make the
progress that they have, ending slavery was a first, necessary step.
I certainly don't consider their experience under American law to be
much better than slavery from the end of Reconstruction until the
successes of the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.
No, I'm not convinced that Lincoln
deserves to be stripped of the honor in which many Americans hold
him. We need to look at him with open eyes, of course, and not with
blind hero-worship.
