Abraham Lincoln Monument Torched In Chicago

Abraham Lincoln has joined George Washington on the list of those targeted by Chicagoans in a national debate over Civil War-era monuments.

Alderman Raymond Lopez took to Facebook Wednesday night to decry a defaced statue of the nation’s 16th president in the Englewood neighborhood. The giant bust appears to have been damaged after someone in the 15th Ward sprayed and ignited a flammable liquid.

“What an absolute disgraceful act of vandalism. This bust of Abraham Lincoln, erected by Phil Bloomquist on August 31, 1926, was damaged & burned,” Mr. Lopez wrote, a local NBC affiliate reported. “If anyone has any information regarding this act, please contact the police or my office immediately.”

“F- Abe Lincoln,” responded Quintin Mitchell, whose comment was “liked” or deemed “funny” by 160 others.

The official’s finding came just one day after President Trump stated opposition to tearing down memorials related to America’s past with slavery.

“I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” Mr. Trump asked reporters on Tuesday while addressing violence in Virginia.

Many of the Founding Fathers recognized that slavery was evil, even some of those who owned slaves, but they were optimistic that it was on the way out. If that Yankee had not invented the cotton gin, maybe it would have declined. From about 1830 you start to see a new attitude in the South on the part of people claiming that slavery was a positive good and that the slaves were better off in servitude.

The people who are asserting their virtue today by denouncing the Confederacy don't know how they would have acted if they had been alive in the 1850-1865 period. If they had been slave owners would they have freed their slaves and adopted a life of poverty for themselves and their families?

The slaveholding aristocracy was so entrenched in power in the slave states that it was hard to imagine how the institution could be ended. Delaware was a slave state with only a few thousand slaves (more "free persons of color" than slaves there) but even during the war the slaveholders resisted very strongly any effort to end slavery there. When West Virginia broke away from Virginia, they did not free the slaves but only adopted a plan for gradual emancipation (to benefit black people born after a certain date, not those already enduring slavery).

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