It clarifies things a great deal, doesn't it?
Historians and teachers have made Lincoln into a near-god. But at heart he was in the presidency because he was a politician, not a humanitarion.
I grew up admiring Lincoln. Oddly enough it was my best friend from HighSchool who is black, and who was a history major in college that first started me questioning what we had all been taught.
I used to go over to his house and we would lift weights, and one day he was smiling and chortling about something he had learned in College that day. He said that he had just Learned that Lincoln cleverly and deliberately provoked the Confederates into firing on Ft. Sumter. I asked for clarification.
He said Lincoln was advised of ways to resupply the fort without a lot of fuss, but he deliberately eschewed those. He sent a letter to the commander of the fort telling him to prepare for an attack, and then he sent a letter to the Confederates telling them that he was going to resupply the Fort overland by Wagon train, and quite publicly.
He said Lincoln was a shrewd reader of people, and he knew the confederates would take that letter as an affront, and with a little luck, they would play right into his hands.
Now I was a little shocked by this, because I had never before heard that Lincoln had deliberately intended to start that war. I had always heard it was the Confederates who started it and that Lincoln was a great leader and Hero.
I found this information quite disquieting, and it caused me to start questioning everything I had been taught about what happened and why. That's when I started to realize that what we've been taught as the history doesn't hold together correctly. It's full of things that don't make sense when viewed as they have taught it.
I don't claim to have it all figured out, but I have learned to be quite skeptical of what we have been taught regarding Lincoln and the Civil war.
#104.
FReegards.
Thanks for a great post.
I learned in school that “Lincoln Freed The Slaves.” No details were taught about those he did not free.
Also, from as far back in grammar school as I can recall, we were all instructed that Lincoln was one of the two top presidents. It was unquestioned - he was presented to schoolkids as the closest thing to a diety as ever walked the soil of America.
And that was before the Rosa Parks and MLK days.
It wasn’t until I decided to study the events leading up to the war between the states to better understand modern racial tension that I learned about Lincoln’s duplicity and, in my view, weakness as a president.
I now rate him as one of the worst presidents we have ever had.
What other president ever presided over the killing and wounding of one million or more Americans?
That is more than 3% of the entire 1860 population.
Imagine if we had a war today that resulted in over 3% of our population being killed or wounded - that would nine million casualties.
Once hostilities broke out Lincoln devoted his energies to a military solution even though it was American vs. American - brother and father killing father and brother.
A great diplomat, a great leader, could have and should have brokered a way to stop the killing long before 750,000 of his countrymen were dead.
See here for one of the most recent views on the number of Civil War KIA:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html