Posted on 09/27/2014 12:46:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage.
Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 92: When President Abraham Lincoln met with free black leaders in 1862, what did he propose?
Today marks the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s “shot heard ’round the world.” I’m referring, of course, to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he fired off from the White House on Sept. 22, 1862, five days after the real bullets had been fired 70 miles outside of Washington, D.C., at the Battle of Antietam (then and now the bloodiest day in American history, with close to 23,000 casualties).
What little Union victory there was in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s withdrawal from Maryland gave Lincoln the opening he needed to issue the Confederacy his ultimatum: If it remained in a state of rebellion come Jan. 1, 1863, he would sign an executive order rendering “all” of its “slaves … then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
For any student of American history, this is well-trod ground. But here’s what you may not know about those crowded days of late summer 1862. While weighing emancipation, Lincoln also had a very different kind of ultimatum on his mind—for African Americans. For much of his first years in office, Lincoln was obsessed with solving America’s seemingly intractable race problem by persuading free blacks to lead the way for an exodus that would wash the United States of the original sin of slavery—without having to live alongside those it had enslaved....
(Excerpt) Read more at theroot.com ...
It’s best to “skip” Gates.
This inspires me to have a beer summit . . . with myself, this Saturday.
The African country of Liberia was started as a country for freed American slaves, wasn’t it?
This flake should stick to beer summits with the corrupt one in the WH.
Yes it was...for those who wanted to return to Africa.
I thought he wanted it to be an option?
Excellent article. Thanks for posting.
Lincoln on equality:
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.”
Lincoln on inter-racial marriage:
“Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse and the increase of mixed breed bastards may some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.”
“Liberia is the only country in Africa founded by United States colonization while occupied by native Africans. Beginning in 1820, the region was colonized by African Americans, most of whom were freed slaves. The colonizers (who later become known as Americo-Liberians) established a new country with the help of the American Colonization Society, a private organization whose leaders thought former slaves would have greater opportunity in Africa. African captives freed from slave ships by the British and Americans were sent there instead of being repatriated to their countries of origin.
In 1847, this new country became the Republic of Liberia, establishing a government modeled on that of the United States and naming its capital city Monrovia after James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States and a prominent supporter of the colonization. The colonists and their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, led the political, social, cultural and economic sectors of the country and ruled the nation for over 130 years as a dominant minority.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia
Yet another racist Obama crony who needs to get off the national stage.
He was looking for a way to right a wrong at least cost and pain.
Since they had been stolen from their own land, he proposed to either return them to the land they were stolen from, or give them a land of their own. That might not have been such a bad thing, giving them their own country.
It didn’t work out. That doesn’t make it a bad idea.
IF an offer of 100 dollars in gold bullion per head and free passage back home had been offered., how many would have went back to lives of hardship and even worse barbarities?
Every day is a beer summit day lately!
How are they doing?
Does that really sound like Lincoln?
It may be something somebody else (Rev. James Mitchell) wrote to Lincoln, but it's not something he said or wrote himself (even though you see it attributed to him a lot on fringe sites). To be sure, Mitchell (if he even said it) was Lincoln's commissioner for Negro colonization, but those words aren't Lincoln's.
Lincoln favored colonization or "self-deportation" to Africa, the Caribbean or Central America as an option for freed slaves for much of his life. So did most other moderates who had misgivings about slavery. The alternatives were support for slavery or joining the abolitionist fringe which was considered impossibly radical for a politician in most of the country.
Where Lincoln was on the issue at the end of his life is hard to say -- he was killed before he could tell us -- but he had evolved over the years, and most probably came to see coexistence, citizenship and (for some Blacks) suffrage as a worthy policy. Most of Lincoln's talk about colonization goes back to the time before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Gates is a self serving tool, who seeks to excoriate Lincoln through his entirely out of context and ddeplorale tome.
Only at the end does he throw a gratuitous lifeline to Lincoln’s thinking and character.
We knew about this a long time ago Mr. Gates.
Sorry Lincoln tried to find ways to rid the nation of the scourge of slavery and must couldn’t quite pull it off well enough for you, except that you can leverage your esteemed place in modern race relations, for an agenda that seeks to fill a well of anger, which has no depth and coukd never be filled for all the machinations you go through.
“I freed who?”
“Well, you’re welcome”
Apparently, your second quote was not from Lincoln.
From Abraham Lincoln Quarterly (VI, 3):
“On May 15, 1862, the Reverend James Mitchell of Indiana., later appointed Commissioner of Emigration, presented Lincoln with additional reasons why the Negroes should be colonized. Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people, he declared; as long as the Negroes continued to live with the whites they would constitute a threat to the national life. Family life might also collapse and the increase of “the mixed breed bastards,” might some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.”
sierra Leone was started by freed slaves.
Really? I didn’t know that about Sierra Leone. Interesting, I will check more into the history of that country.
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