Tweet
The new film about Lincoln is light years ahead of earlier films but makes Lincoln out to be anti-racist, which is not entirely true and doesn’t explain his development from support for African colonization to support for the Thirteenth Amendment, which along with the 14th (citizenship) and 15th (voting rights) Amendments created a bloc of millions of new voting citizens. That was the fundamental building block for Reconstruction.
The Republicans, who had expunged our bought out the radicals in the years since 1865-66 betrayed newly emancipated Blacks in 1877, ended Reconstruction and set the stage for Democrat (ex-Confederate) control of the South and Jim Crow, a newer form of slavery, which hung on until the last decades of the last century. Recent;y Jim Crow was replaced by the newest form of slavery – imprisonment of blacks under racist drug laws. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (by Michelle Alexander – BP). The book, which received the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, presents the professor’s look at the U.S. prison system and the effect of the justice system’s policies on young Black men. As of 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Justice estimated there were over 846,000 Black men in prison, making up 40.2% of all inmates in the system at large.” http://www.newjimcrow.com/
Of course Lincoln was gay. Get a copy of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, a sex researcher and protégé of Alfred Kinsey.
The other central flaw of the film is that it ignores the fact that the Civil War was the Second American Revolution, fought to solve the slavery question, which was held over by the 1788 Constitution. Speaking of the potential of slavery to end the Union, Thomas Jefferson said “But this momentous question [the Missouri Compromise question], like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union…. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. ” Slavery did end the union as much because the slaveowners wanted to extend slavery to the Northern states as because of Abolitionist agitation by Douglass, Garrison and others culminating in John Browns Raid in 1859.
When the slavers seceded Northern and border state small farmers, city workers and emancipated African Americans, soon joined by self emancipated African Americans, rose up in their millions, donned the Blue and crushed the slavers and their degenerate society. In spite of horrendous causalities and incompetent military and political leadership the Union Army won the civil war. Politicians, including Lincoln, responded to the victories of the Union Army, a determioned and unbelievably brave revolutionary army, and not the other way around.
2 Comments
“…not the other way around…”
In an otherwise good and interesting thread, this statement is nonsense, on the face of it. Lincoln had been critic of slavery all his political career, but he was also practical enough to want to avoid the last step; the dissolution of the Union. His leadership; his wonderful articulation of what was at stake, at a time when the spoken word was of paramount importance and public speaking could make or break a politician, was brilliant. Gore Vidal referred to him as “this cool, aloof, genius”, which is accurate enough, but ignored the simple fact that when it came to human rights, Abraham Lincoln was anything but “cool and aloof”.
He, far more than any other person, galvanized the north to bring the slavers (excellent term, by the way!) to heel.
On the part of the troops:
“Father Abraham, we are coming.” was not an original statement: it was an answer to Lincoln’s call.
Lincoln was not always the hardened war leader he became towards the end and in the beginning he was, even judged by the norms of his own time, a racist because he initially favored colonization (1) instead of citizenship following Emancipation. Later, as Lincoln changed, Douglass changed his mind about Lincoln and had this to say at the at the Unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln “He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. … He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. … We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption … Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.’
In the beginning he was a poor war leader. His selection of a series of politically unreliable and or incompetent generals gave the slaveocracy, which was popular, to say the least, in all parts of the Confederacy. gave the slavers the time they need to consolidate their new government and build their army. His initial missteps, like the appointment and reappointment of pro-secesh and wildly incompetent generals like McClellan prolonged the war.
But at every turn it was the revolutionary determination of the farmers, city workers and emancipated and self emancipated African Americans (a term he would not have liked much) that saved the Union time and again and whose stunning victories at won him reelection.
(1)”Almost 150 years after it was proposed by Abraham Lincoln, black colonization still ranks among the most controversial and least understood policies of the Civil War. Premised upon racial separation, this movement sought to establish a distinct black nationality by removing the slave population to Liberia and the Caribbean. It rightly strikes the modern reader as a relic of racial bigotry and misguided paternalism. Yet for the better part of the war, the United States government extensively studied and even subsidized black resettlement.”