>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Being called a liar by you is like being called ugly by Hillary Clinton."
Quit lying, and I won't bring it up.
*****************
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Lincoln spoke out against slavery almost all his career"
Lincoln barely mentioned slavery before 1854, and the few times he did it was politically-timed to promote Whig economic agenda. The amoral Whig party was split over slavery, but strictly for political reasons:
"Along with the other Young Indians, Lincoln hoped not just to elect a presidential candidate but to formulate a new set of beliefs for the Whig party in place of old doctrines that no longer aroused public interest. Without some vital, controlling principles, there was a danger that Whigs might follow local, sectional interests. In the South some Whigs were tempted to make a defense of slavery their central issue, so that they could demonstrate that they, rather than the Democrats, more truly represented their region's interests. In the Northeast many Whigs, troubled by the huge influx of immigrants, who tended to vote Democratic, flirted with the Native American party. Other party leaders thought that a strong antislavery platform could win back the Conscience Whigs, mostly in New England, who were so opposed to any extension of slavery that they were ready to join antislavery Democrats in nominating ex-President Martin Van Buren on the new Free- Soil ticket. All these approaches were tempting—and all would disastrously split the parry. Even if Taylor was elected, he would find that he could not govern.
"To avoid these dangers, Lincoln urged Taylor to put himself above all local and regional issues. The proper Whig policy ought to be one of "making Presidential elections, and the legislation of the country, distinct matters; so that the people can elect whom they please, and afterwards, legislate just as they please, without any hindrance [from the Chief Executive], save only so much as may guard against infractions of the constitution, undue haste, and want of consideration." He wanted Taylor to announce: "Were I president, I should desire the legislation of the country to rest with Congress, uninfluenced by the executive in it's origin or progress, and undisturbed by the veto unless in very special and clear cases." When Taylor made this pledge, Lincoln was jubilant, and he took the floor of the House of Representatives to explain what it meant: "In substance, it is this: The people say to Gen: Taylor 'If you are elected, shall we have a national bank?' He answers Your will, gentlemen, not mine.' 'What about the Tariff?' 'Say yourselves.' 'Shall our rivers and harbours be improved?' 'Just as you please.'
"Even on the most divisive issues relating to slavery, Lincoln believed Taylor's position should be the same. Though Taylor was a Southerner and the owner of more than two hundred slaves, he should declare that if Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico, he would not veto it. (Lincoln did not explain that this contingency was highly unlikely, since no version of the Wilmot Proviso could pass the Senate, which was dominated by Southerners.) This position, Lincoln maintained, was 'the best sort of principle' for a party, 'the principle of allowing the people to do as they please with their own business.'"
[David Herbert Donald, "Lincoln." Touchstone, 1996, p.127]
Slavery was just another political tool for Lincoln and the Whigs.
*****************
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "and his actions in support of the amendment ending slavery are well documented by historians. Including David Herbert Donald, who you seem to be so fond of quoting."
Are you intentionally avoiding the pesky Corwin Amendment? David Donald was a Lincolnite, who tended to put Lincoln in a favorable light, whenever possible; but he was also a historian who couldn't completely avoid mentioning the proposed amendment:
"In Washington government officials could not agree on how to deal with the increasingly serious crisis. The President, along with many other conservatives, favored calling a national convention to amend the Constitution so as to redress Southern grievances. The House of Representatives created the Committee of Thirty-three, with one congressman from each state, to deal with the crisis. After much debate the committee proposed admission of New Mexico as a state, more stringent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, repeal of the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern states to prevent the reclamation of fugitives, and adoption of a constitutional amendment prohibiting future interference with slavery."
[Ibid. p.268]
Other, less ideologically-driven historians provide more details:
"I first came across the Corwin Amendment in my own studies a decade ago while writing an undergraduate senior thesis on the secession crisis, and little new has been written about it since then. Aside from the aforementioned proliferation of passing references, most of which treat it as a quaint side story to the secession crisis, the only truly thorough analysis of this subject was written half a century ago by R. Alton Lee for the Ohio Historical Society."
"So why have historians generally dodged this subject, or at least neglected it by relegation to a curiosity? First and foremost, the amendment's status as a 'path not taken' (and fortunately so from a modern constitutional perspective) has caused it to be overshadowed by other events in its vicinity. Second, there is a very strong level of discomfort created by the realization that slavery very nearly became a permanent and explicit fixture of the Constitution, as recently noted by Daniel W. Crofts: the Corwin 'amendment tells modern Americans something about our national history that we do not want to know.' Third, it tells us something about a pragmatist side to Abraham Lincoln's racial views and in doing so casts the 'Great Emancipator' in all too human terms (a subject I've addressed at length in other areas of his presidency)…"
"For his own part, Lincoln made no public statement about the amendment until after its adoption (he described it and stated in his first inaugural address on March 4th that he had 'no objection to its being made express and irrevocable'). Yet as Lee thoroughly documents, Lincoln actively lobbied behind the scenes to drum up support for the amendment after he arrived in Washington in late February. A young Henry Adams, who was clerking for his congressman father and Corwin Amendment co-sponsor Charles Francis Adams, affirms this as well, noting that the amendment's adoption by the narrowest of two-thirds majorities came only because of 'some careful manipulation, as well as the direct influence of the new President.'"
[Phillip W. Magness, "Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment." Philip W. Magness]
And then there is the alternate plan of colonization:
"Did He Ever Lose Faith In A Borrowed Plan To Solve The Slavery Question?
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.... Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation....
"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.... We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN December 1, 1862
"Although Abraham Lincoln was a master of words, few of his passages are more powerful than these lines from his annual message to Congress in the second year of the war. Made public precisely one month before the promised final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was due, they seem almost to have come from a life-long ardent abolitionist.
"Not so.
"This passage is the president's final argument to Congress, urging the adoption of three proposed amendments to the Constitution. Collectively, the amendments incorporate basic features of his borrowed plan for solution of the slavery problem: abolition by individual states, with compensation to owners, and colonization of black "Americans" with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States." "Had lawmakers been sufficiently inspired by Abraham Lincoln's winged words to act promptly upon his recommendations, the Emancipation Proclamation would not have been issued. Speedy adoption of his proposed amendments would have made the document obsolete before it could take effect."
[Webb Garrison, "The Lincoln No One Knows: the mysterious man who ran the Civil War." Rutledge Hill Press, 1993, pp.185-186]
If that is not enough to question Lincoln's motives, then consider the documents that imply his motive for keeping slavery out of the new territories was NOT based on his rejection of slavery, but rather to ensure the territories were lily-white.
It is time to stamp out revisionist history with the truth:
"The conversion of the Lincoln Memorial into an icon of antiracism by Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr., then, is misleading. Most of the white American opponents of slavery in his time, like Lincoln, had no intention of creating a color-blind, multiracial society in the United States. Among Lincoln's contemporaries, only a minority of white abolitionists and Radical Republicans such as Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner, together with black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, could envision an America in which citizens of all races formed a single community. They—not Abraham Lincoln—are the genuine patron saints of post-racist America, and it is an injustice to their memory to give credit for antiracist reforms to Lincoln rather than to them and their successors in movements for racial and sexual equality."
[Lind, Michael, "What Lincoln Believed." Doubleday, 2005, p.19]
To put it mildly.
Mr. Kalamata
In his post #745 Kalamata argues that in contrast to sincere abolitionists like... Jefferson Davis, Lincoln supported slavery when it suited him politically, only opposed it when political winds blew that direction.
Kalamata: "Lincoln barely mentioned slavery before 1854, and the few times he did it was politically-timed to promote Whig economic agenda.
The amoral Whig party was split over slavery, but strictly for political reasons:"
Lincoln himself said otherwise:
- "I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist." AL Chicago speech -1858"
- "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong... I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel."
AL to Hodges 1864
- "In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis.
You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons.
That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border."
AL to Speed, 1855
- "I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death---to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old."
AL to Durley, 1845
- Whig Congressman Lincoln supported the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, banning slavery from new territories.
- Whig Congressman Lincoln wrote & introduced a bill in 1847 to abolish slavery in Washington, DC.
- In 1849 Lincoln left Congress and returned to private law practice, but was drawn back to Republican politics by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska act, expanding slavery into territories.
- [The pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act had] "declared indifference, but as I must think, a covert real zeal for the spread of slavery.
I cannot but hate it.
I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.
I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world..."
AL Peoria Speech -1854
The truth is, Lincoln opposed slavery all his life, and as a practical politician, all that politics would allow.
Kalamata: "Slavery was just another political tool for Lincoln and the Whigs."
The Whig party died in 1856 because it did not consistently oppose slavery.
In 1854, the Republican party grew from an alliance of anti-slavery Whigs and free-soil Democrats.
Lincoln joined the Republicans in 1856.
Kalamata quoting HL Donald, 1996: "In Washington government officials could not agree on how to deal with the increasingly serious crisis.
The President, along with many other conservatives, favored calling a national convention to amend the Constitution so as to redress Southern grievances."
That president was not Lincoln, it was Democrat James Buchanan.
Kalamata quoting Magnus, 2017, on Corwin: "Lincoln actively lobbied behind the scenes to drum up support for the amendment after he arrived in Washington in late February.
A young Henry Adams, who was clerking for his congressman father and Corwin Amendment co-sponsor Charles Francis Adams, affirms this as well, noting that the amendment's adoption by the narrowest of two-thirds majorities came only because of 'some careful manipulation, as well as the direct influence of the new President.' "
Here's the truth: the entire argument that "Lincoln supported Corwin" is based on hearsay testimony from Lt. Col. Peter Venkman, who reported hearing from a whistleblower what Adam Schiff claimed was the President's conversation with... somebody... who? Doesn't matter, the Republican President is guilty of whatever Democrats claim. </sarcasm>
Kalamata quoting Garrison, 1993, on Lincoln's pre-emancipation plan: "abolition by individual states, with compensation to owners, and colonization of black "Americans" with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States."
Note the key words: "with their own consent".
Kalamata quoting Lind, 2005: "Most of the white American opponents of slavery in his time, like Lincoln, had no intention of creating a color-blind, multiracial society in the United States.
Among Lincoln's contemporaries, only a minority of white abolitionists and Radical Republicans... "
Lincoln was a practical politician who hated slavery and took every opportunity to oppose it, culminating in the 13th Amendment.
And Lincoln's support for the 15th Amendment (black suffrage) is what triggered John Wilkes Booth to murder him. ![]()