[Walt] Later he said:
[Walt] "When you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood..."
[Walt] It just seems impossible that you could be striving for a fair interpretation of these events when you won't consider the whole record.
Alright. The whole record, both sides.
"As for his steady refusal to sanction the death penalty in cases of desertion, there was far more policy in the course than fine feeling. . . . . As Secretary Chase said at the time, 'Such kindness to the criminal is cruelty to the army, for it encourages the cowardly to leave the brave and patriotic unsupported.' "
The Real Lincoln, Charles L.C. Minor, p.23
The ya go, Abe at his most generous and forgiving.
But now it is back to a quote from Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Still more unmistakable evidence of Lincoln's orientation can be found in his failure to provide equal pay and equal protection for Black soldiers, who were promised thirteen dollars a month, the same pay as White privates, and were insulted with an offer of seven dollars. Many Black soldiers refused to accept the seven dollars. When the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill providing the six dollar difference, the state's Black soldiers refused to accept the money, saying they were fighting for a principle, not money.
Pressing that issue, Black and White abolitionists organized a national campaign in favor of Black soldiers, but Lincoln refused to budge. When his conservative attorney general Edward Bates told him that it was his constitutional duty to order equal pay, he sat on the opinion until Congress rebelled. Before Congress rectified Lincoln's error, a brave Black sergeant named William Walker, who participated in a protest against Lincoln's policy, was arrested and charged with mutiny. At his trial, he pleaded in extenuation that "nearly the whole of his regiment acted in like manner as himself," that "when the Regiment stacked arms and refused further duty .... I did not then exercise any command over them" and that "I carried my arms and equipment back with me to my company street."
Ignoring this testimony and pleas from major leaders, including some Union officers, a military court sentenced Sergeant Walker to death. Although Lincoln repeatedly overruled the death sentences of White soldiers, he looked the other way when, on February 29, 1864, at 9 o'clock in the morning, Sergeant William Walker of Company A, South Carolina Volunteers, was "shot to death with musketry" in the presence of his brigade (Berlin 392-4). A biting footnote was added by Massachusetts Governor Andrew, who said that "the Lincoln administration which found no law to pay Walker except as a nondescript or contraband, nevertheless found law enough to shoot him as a soldier" (Pearson 109).
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 543
That is not true. Feeling in the north generally, and in the army, was that it would sully the noble cause of fighting for democratic government to bring emancipation into the equation.
"``What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet! Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? Is there a single court, or magistrate, or individual that would be influenced by it there? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that that law has caused a single slave to come over to us. And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them? How can we feed and care for such a multitude? Gen. Butler wrote me a few days since that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who have rushed to him than to all the white troops under his command. They eat , and that is all, though it is true Gen. Butler is feeding the whites also by the thousand; for it nearly amounts to a famine there. If, now, the pressure of the war should call off our forces from New Orleans to defend some other point, what is to prevent the masters from reducing the blacks to slavery again; for I am told that whenever the rebels take any black prisoners, free or slave, they immediately auction them off! They did so with those they took from a boat that was aground in the Tennessee river a few days ago. And then I am very ungenerously attacked for it!"
Of course when Lincoln wrote those words, he had every intention of issuing an emancipation proclamation as soon as he felt the country would support it.
Walt