I apologize. You are usually decent in your responses and I should not have done it.
And while I think more was involved than simply criticism, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus to prevent rebels from taking over Maryland and keep the capital from being surrounded or overrun.
Without Lincoln using force to control Maryland, it very likely would have seceded with the other states, though i've seen some evidence to the contrary. In playing "chicken" with South Carolina, he was tampering with events that were going to spiral out of control.
I don't think Lincoln expected the disaster he ended up with, but he should have done.
For the segregationists of the 1950s what Eisenhower was doing at Little Rock was similar to or the same as what Lincoln was doing a century before in the eyes of the secessionists.
Your attempt to link these two men is ironic, because Lincoln was himself a very determined segregationist. Segregation is exactly what he wanted. He wanted black people kept away from white society. It's ugly, but that was what Lincoln spoke and wrote.
It appears to me now that Lincoln regarded black people as pawns in his game to attain power and keep it, but what he did was never done for their sake, it was done for his own purposes.
Lincoln came closer to believing in equality than 90% percent of his contemporaries and closer than some of Eisenhower's contemporaries.
That is not my understanding of Lincoln at all. I don't think Lincoln ever believed in equality. With just a little looking, I can find some examples of things he said and speeches he gave where he demonstrates he clearly regards black people as unequal.
Do you have some particular statement from Lincoln in mind when you say he believed in equality?
Do you? I have pointed out time and time again that you reject non-material motivations beforehand and then, when you don't see any, conclude that there weren't any.
I believe material motivations are the only thing constant in human history, and pretensions of goodness are a smoke screen for efforts to attain and hold power. Now I will not dispute that there are "true believer" kooks out there who drink the koolaid and buy the con, but the movers and shakers who tend to underpin these events are generally motivated by money and power and how to attain and keep it.
Global warming? (Carbon credits, solar, windmills, increased government power, etc.) Sex education? (Planned parenthood, abortions, contraception, medical research on aborted fetuses) Covid 19? (More government control, stealing elections, protecting China.) Black lives matters? ( Stealing elections, intimidating the opposition, creating excuses to arrest people.)
There are true believers in all this stuff, but the big guns behind the scenes are always using it as a vehicle to power.
It's nice that you've learned the phrase, but disappointing that you don't recognize it in your own postings.
I do not recognize it in my own postings. Perhaps your perception of it is too subtle for me to grasp. Can you give me a better explained example of where I have done this?
The same could be said for Jefferson Davis or the secessionist movement -- or maybe the abolitionist movement for that matter. Or even politicians today.
Your attempt to link these two men is ironic, because Lincoln was himself a very determined segregationist. Segregation is exactly what he wanted. He wanted black people kept away from white society.
Lincoln was impressed with the bravery and commitment of Black troops and moved by the rapturous reception the freedmen and freedwomen gave him in Richmond at the end of the war. He met with African-American delegations in the White House and was impressed by them. Grant may have done the same, but years later it became quite a sensation or scandal when Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House.
Lincoln was moving away from the segregationist or separationist ideas he had in earlier life, and while he admitted to having the aversion to Blacks that most of his white contemporaries had, he was able even before winning the presidency to step back from visceral reactions and think about race relations in more intellectual terms, something that others of his day found it hard to do.
In Lincoln's day and for generations afterwards, very few White Americans wanted to live together with African-Americans as equals, but Lincoln's statement shortly before his assassination that the vote ought to be given to some Blacks indicated that he had come to accept that African-Americans did have a place in America.
It appears to me now that Lincoln regarded black people as pawns in his game to attain power and keep it, but what he did was never done for their sake, it was done for his own purposes.
That could be said of any politician, then or now. Indeed, since you discount non-material moral motives it's hard to see what you're faulting Lincoln with. Lincoln wasn't a modern day welfare state liberal who professed to "care" about minority groups or the downtrodden. He wanted people to look out for themselves and thought they had the ability to do so. I suspect we may exaggerate the centrality of African-Americans in Lincoln's thinking and acting. He believed that slavery was bad for the country and was morally wrong and indications are that his belief was sincere.
I do not recognize it in my own postings. Perhaps your perception of it is too subtle for me to grasp. Can you give me a better explained example of where I have done this?
Your method is to discount moral motives at the outset. Then you say you couldn't find any. If you don't see that as circular reasoning I can't make you see it, but others will understand that in human affairs, moral motives aren't absent and that the material and moral motives are hard to disentangle. We fought Hitler because he threatened our position in the world, but our opposition to him and our resolve to win the war had moral grounds as well.