What a lame, pathetic, cya effort it was.
Wlatspeak = "advocating the suffrage for black soldiers"
Abespeak = "I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in ..."
February 22, 1864, Hahn won election as Governor of the State of Louisiana with 6,183 votes.
http://www.loyno.edu/history/journal/1991-2/battle.htm
In March of 1864, following the election of Governor Michael Hahn -- an opponent of enfranchisement -- Jean Baptist Roudanez, a young engineer and son of Louis Charles Roudanez, and a young wine merchant named E. Arnold Bertonneau, traveled to Washington, D.C. to pursue the issue of voting rights. <13> They carried with them a petition listing more than a thousand names, "all representing both real or personal property." The basis of their demands for political recognition were the same facts which they had presented to various officials during the previous years: the services of their fathers under Jackson, their assistance to Butler and Banks during the war, their claims to ownership of property, and their loyalty to the United States. <14>
After a meeting with President Lincoln, the delegates' demands were turned down. The president stressed the urgency of restoring the Union, and that he regarded the issue of recognizing the free Blacks as enfranchised citizens a moral one in which he could not intervene. He would take such steps "whenever they could show that such accession would be necessary to the readmission of Louisiana as a State in the Union." But in a letter congratulating Hahn on his election, written shortly after the delegation's departure, Lincoln noted that the issue would more than likely reappear in the upcoming state constitutional convention. He wrote:
I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in -- as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to be public, but to you alone. <15>
Two months later, on May 10, a proviso was written into the state constitution stating "that the Legislature shall never pass any act authorizing free Negroes to vote, or to immigrate into this state under any pretense whatever."
Citations:
Donald E. Everett, "Demands of the New Orleans Free Colored Population for Political Equality, 1862-1865," Louisiana Historical Quarterly (April, 1955).
Brenda Marie Osbey, "Faubourg Treme: Community in Transition, Part II," New Orleans Tribune (January 1991).
13 Osbey, Part III, p. 15.
14 Everett, p. 50.
15 Everett, pp. 50-51.
[Wlat 1885] He -openly- worked for the passage of the 13th amendment, which amply backed up his public pronouncements.
Lincoln's emigration aide Rev. James Mitchell told the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat on August 16, 1894, the foundation of Lincoln's private and public policy. It was "his honest conviction that it was better for both races to separate. This was the central point of his policy, around which hung all his private views, and as far as others would let him, his public acts" Lincoln was "fully convinced" that "the republic was already dangerously encumbered with African blood that would not legally mix with American [sic] . . . . He regarded a mixed race as eminently anti-republican, because of the heterogeneous character it gives the population where it exists, and for similar reasons he did not favor the annexation of tropical lands encumbers with mixed races ...."
Politicians persistently "work for" peace on earth, good will, and prosperity for all. Persistently, they require one more term to obtain for the people whatever it is they currently claim to "work for."
During the Lincoln administration, where White soldiers were paid $13, Black soldiers were offered $7. That works sort of like three-fifths or 60% of a person had shrunk under Lincoln to 54% of a person. You can blather all you want about what he allegedly worked for. I don't know of too many politicians who fight for higher taxes but they seem to succeed at that denied goal despite themselves.
Now come on, NC, this would mean that Lincoln created a paradox for himself which was abused for political domination. We all know that 'Honest Abe' wouldn't declare states to be in or out of the union arbitrarily to suit his needs in any given situation.