Posted on 03/05/2011 4:17:47 PM PST by FatherofFive
McLEAN, Va. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a White House audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America.
"For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Good post.
That’s why Frederick Douglass had to go around the country giving his speech: “That the Negro is a man.”
My people arent going to like that(Holder)
LOL! The left doesn't see they are the racists.
Stephen Douglas used to jam coathangers into black mens' ears?
No evil is to be spoken of King Lincoln.
This is supposed to be permanently scrubbed from historical records.
What happened that this is being reported?
Nothing new here. Just look into the origin of Liberia.
Their working class would be complaining about Obama's masses of American unemployed illegally crossing their borders and taking their jobs? LOL!
No. He thought slavery should be “left up to the states.”
In other words, he thought state sovereignty was the first principle of our republic, instead of what it really was: the absolute obligation to protect the God-given and therefore unalienable rights of the people.
Your quote is from one of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and was in response to Douglas’ race-baiting attacks on Lincoln. On July 10, 1858 Lincoln probably gave a far truer statement of his views in a speech at Chicago:
“My friends, I have detained you about as long as I desired to do, and I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other manthis race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior positiondiscarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
I had to laugh. The comment section after the article was locked and closed.
I doubt if it was ever open.
Some folks do not like to remember that the principle of preserving the union was nearly universal in the US from the middle of the 18-teens until well into the 1850’s. The Whigs, including both the Webster and Clay factions took it as a given, and the Jacksonian Democrats were forever proclaiming it. The exceptions included the strong abolitionists, led by John Quincy Adams, and the pro-slavery exponents of nullification, led by John C. Calhoun. These groups were small and unpopular minorities until the chasm widened in the 1850’s.
As a side note, Calhoun would likely have been America’s greatest statesman in the absence of the slavery issue. In the 1820’s he was so universally respected that he was elected Vice President under two Presidents of different parties. He was likely the most powerful Vice President of the 19th century, serving as a leader of the cabinet, sometimes against Jackson’s desires.
“Two events riled anti-slavery forces in America:”
I believe you are overlooking a third, John Brown’s Raid in 1859.
John Brown bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s terrorists, a bearded fanatic who who believes that murdering people is his religious privilege. In his early murders at Pottawatomie creek he and his sons even used swords to slaughter their victims.
Brown’s terrorism was bankrolled by the 19th century equivalent of the Hollywood Left, the wealthy literary set of Boston that included the Howes and the Parkers. Otto Scott wrote a history of them in his book “The Secret Six”.
If I recall correctly the first man killed in Brown’s Harper’s Ferry Raid was a free black man who worked for the railroad. And one of the men they took hostage was Lewis Washington, a grand nephew of George.
In supporting Brown and turning him into a folk hero the North raised the ante to open violence. No longer was the slavery issue to be hammered out in the courts and Congress. The lesson for the South was that war had already been declared on them and they had better recognize it. A year or so later they did.
‘No evil is to be spoken of King Lincoln. This is supposed to be permanently scrubbed from historical records. What happened that this is being reported?’’
This is a straw man argument. No one who has more than a grade school education sees Lincoln as a plaster saint, free from the universal prejudices of his era. The difference is how he rose above much of it, and ended America’s greatest evil, human slavery, while fulfilling his oath to preserve and protect the Constitution and the federal union.
Folks who think Lincoln was a saint likely think that Washington chopped down a cherry tree.
“At the time there was likely hardly any white person who did not agree with this, including the abolitionists.”
Thaddeus Stevens is an abolitionist who did. But he’s probably an exception in a lot of ways. Stevens was the leader of the Radical Republicans in the House and a far more radical man than the much more moderate Lincoln. In some writings Stevens appeared to advocate genocide for the people of the South.
Stevens was a bachelor who lived with a mixed race woman who was reputed to be his mistress. Stevens in his youth was rumored to have been responsible for the death of a young black woman. An odd character for sure.
‘In supporting Brown and turning him into a folk hero the North raised the ante to open violence.’
It is my impression that the military forces of the federal union seized him and turned him over to the government of Virginia to be tried and executed. Please tell me how I am mistaken in this.
Back then, States had much more meaning than they do now. Robert E. Lee was very much against secession, yet wouldn't go against his State. George Thomas, a fellow Virginian, decided that our country was greater than the State (it didn't hurt that he married a lady from New York State and despised slavery).
The Brown raid was very important, but the previous things I wrote about were the main catalysts.
Bad Thad Stevens was a fanatic, as you say, and would never have had the influence he had without the assassination of Lincoln.
I don’t know how it’s jarring to discover that Lincoln suggested black reverse colonization. Didn’t the journalist ever here of Monrovia? Freetown? By that logic, zionism is antisemitic.
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