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I tend to sit on the fence on the Lincoln:hero or tyrant debate. Sure his career was built on prostituting himself for railroad and steel companies, he suspended the habeas corpus writ and instituted the first income tax, but I also tend to beleive that after seeing the carnage he wrought at Gettysburg there was a genuine change. He tried to reconcile with the South after the war. The radicals in his administration did not like this so they looked the other way when they became aware of a plot to assassinate him.

If Lincoln was so much opposed to slavery, why did he not endeavor to abolish it peacefully through a scheme of compensated emancipation?

He tried that, and tried it and tried it again.

If you see his special address to the Congress in 12/1/62 he put forward a scheme that would have emanciapted all slaves by 1900. He had previously tried border state emancipation in 1862. The border state people would have nothing to do with it. In a seeming paradox Lincoln opposed the aboltion of slavery in the District of Columbia, which the Congress passed as soon as the slavers had left town. Lincoln went slow on this, because he knew the 1862 elections would be very important. He was a pretty canny guy. Once he judged the feel of the country, he promulgated the tentative Emancipation Proclamation on 9/22/62. The Republicans lost seats in the Congress but still maintained a working majority. Frederick Douglass:

"Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined."

Lincoln pushed the envelope throughout the war that led to equal rights for all Americans.

All this anti-American neo-nazi/neo-confederate crap won't change that.

Walt

The unstated premise of Stampp’s argument is that Southerners were enemy aliens who deserved whatever their Northern masters dished out to them; if so, anything less than total terror counts as merciful.

What Stampp thinks is a lot less important that what many people thought at the time. And many thought the rebels had forfeited all rights of citizenship. Even President Lincoln referred to the rebels as traitors and their actions as treason.

The rebels were lucky not to been hanged by the hundred -- the way they did to many loyal citizens in a display absolutely NOT matched by the Yankees, who by the way, WERE the masters after rebellion and treason were thrown down.

Walt

God knew that slaves could not be free men.

This is why the Hebrews were made to wander the dessert for 40 years. Only a generation born free could ever truly be free.

Thus the basis for a group of people in our nation who, despite their emancipation, use their right to vote, to encourage those who would bind them in slavery by another name. Alas, there are a many enlightened members of the community who are unfortunately shunned by their brethren.