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To: mrsmel

I had not seen that one. Thanks for posting it.


39 posted on 11/17/2008 12:38:45 PM PST by AuntB (The right to vote in America: Blacks 1870; Women 1920; Native Americans 1925)
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To: AuntB
Thank you. You've probably seen this one---

Abraham Lincoln
Against Miscegenation
June 26, 1857
(…) There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope, upon the chances of being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeat ing, fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes all men, black as well as white; and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes Negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with Negroes! He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.

(…) But Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing blood by the white and black races: agreed for once-a thousand times agreed. There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and black men enough to marry all the black women; and so let them be married. On this point we fully agree with the Judge; and when he shall show that his policy is better adapted to prevent amalgamation than ours we shall drop ours, and adopt his. . . .

I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation. I have no right to say all the members of the Republican party are in favor of this, nor to say that as a party they are in favor of it. There is nothing in their platform directly on the subject. But I can say a very large proportion of its members are for it, and that the chief plank in their platform - opposition to the spread of slavery - is most favorable to that separation.


In case anyone wonders the relevance to this thread, we were discussing the voting patterns, and the historically Solid South (which appears to be indeed now historical), and its differing culture and political ways. That lead to thoughts upon how we could have better protected our culture, and have had some semblence of political self-determination, if Lincoln had not been hypocritical in denying to the South, that very self-determination which he had espoused some years before. I don't refer to either slavery or racism, it's my belief that the South would have done away with it regardless. Very few Southerners, especially those who fought for the Confederacy and States' Rights, were slave owners.
43 posted on 11/17/2008 12:57:30 PM PST by mrsmel (That one is not my president.)
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