Posted on 06/25/2002 10:40:23 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861
The Emancipation Proclamation, more than any act, exposes the real President Lincoln and hits at the core of why the mythical day of June 19 is celebrated.
Issued on the 22nd day of September in 1862, [the Emancipation Proclamation] stated that on the first day of January 1863, "all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
Clearly, this was a war measure for suppressing the so-called rebellion. If the Confederate States of America stop rebelling before Jan. 1, 1863, they could keep their slaves.
This document suggested that one could not own another human unless one was loyal to the United States. Then again, how could the president free anyone in another nation? The document did not apply to the four border states, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, slave states that remained loyal to and in the United States.
Where the president had authority (in the border states), he did nothing; where he had no authority (in the CSA), he did something.
Why do African-Americans continue to praise Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation? Are we allowing miseducation that flatters our thinking to overtake us? Slavery, legal slavery, ended in December 1865, when three-fourths of the states ratified the 13th Amendment.
"Juneteenth," the 19th of June, started as a traditional Texas celebration and now has expanded. It marks the date when the news of Lincoln's proclamation reached parts of the state of Texas in 1865. The document had first been issued in September 1862. The president had taken advantage of a Union victory during the Civil War, the Battle of Antietam, to make his preliminary announcement of emancipation, to become effective on Jan. 1, 1863. The story goes that it was not until June 19, 1865, after Lincoln had died, that slaves in Galveston, Texas, were read General Order No. 3 "that, in accordance with the president's proclamation, all slaves were free."
The proclamation did not free slaves; nor did the order delivered by Gen. Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865. On that date, Texas was not even part of the United States, thus any orders issued to Texas would be of no consequence. Yet still slaves in Texas were told that the late President Lincoln, with the stroke of his pen, had "freed" them and other slaves in rebelling states.
Now 139 years later, this mythical date of African-American freedom is celebrated, mainly by African-Americans. They turn out with parades, holiday attire and spirit to commemorate and praise Lincoln and the document. Ironically, to many the 19th of June symbolizes African-American Independence Day and is celebrated in lieu of the Fourth of July.
Students are still instructed that Lincoln did away with slavery with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. To credit the 16th president of the United States with being "the Great Emancipator" is shameless hypocrisy, a pathological exercise in intellectual sissyism.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln made it very clear that he had no interest, directly or indirectly, in interfering with slavery where it legally existed.
He was opposed to the expansion of slavery. He feared that competition with slavery would have a negative impact on free white laborers in the territories. He could not void the Constitution, which protected and encouraged slavery; an amendment to the Constitution was required.
Any individual, group or organization that parlays June 19 into a freedom-day celebration for blacks is either miseducated, misinformed or just plain hustling people who are seeking validation and acceptance. The ratification date of the 13th Amendment in 1865 would be more appropriate for a celebration.
It is time to face the facts squarely: The plain and painful truth is that Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator of African-American freedom. Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor General Order No. 3 freed slaves in the United States or in Texas, as the Juneteenth celebration would have it.
In fact, Lincoln was as elusive on the issues of freedom for African-Americans as equality of opportunity is today.
If one interprets the documents literally, slaves in the United States remained in slavery. There is no justifiable cause to celebrate a myth or bad news.
In the abstract, Lincoln used what is known as tricky logic. He moved politically, not morally. In his words, there was an immutable physical barrier of color and probably of mental and moral inferiority separating the black and white races.
Lincoln felt that African-Americans were included in the Declaration of Independence, yet he denied and did not believe in social and political equality of the races. He refused to support the abolitionist movement.
Lincoln was not in favor of African-American citizenship in the United States and he advocated colonization as a solution to the race problem. This might explain why in August 1862, one month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he called so-called African-American leaders to the White House and told them that money had been appropriated by Congress to colonize "their kind" outside the country.
If African-Americans are looking for pre-1865 heroes to praise, David Walker, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Denmark Vesey and many more would fit the criteria. If African-Americans need documentation, try reading David Walker's "Appeal," Henry Highland Garnet's "Message to the Slaves" or Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?"
I suggest African-Americans rethink Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth when choosing celebrations and be careful that we do not contribute to the continuance of our own ignorance.
Dr. Theman Ray Taylor Sr. is a history professor at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway.
This article was published on Saturday, June 15, 2002
I am not being sarcastic. I am not defending slavery. And no, I am not white. I simply want to know where and when slavery truly started. Ultimately, aren't the people who captured these individuals the ones who began the cycle of American slavery?
"The life-giving principle and the death-doing stroke must proceed from the same hand." Not hands. A state convention gave it's assent to the Constitution. A state convention rescinded it's assent to the Constitution.
Oh please! What swill. June 19th came and went last week and there wasn't even a line in the papers about any kind of celebration. Black people do not celebrate Lincoln and in fact they wouldn't even vote for him if he was running for office today because as a rule, they vote only for liberal, wealth-redistributing Democrats. And Lincoln was a Republican.
As for the Emancipation Declaration, it all but ended slavery whether some Lincoln enemies want to nitpick at the wording or not. Lincoln could not free the slaves in the Union at that time because he needed the border states to win the war. And freeing the slaves in the border states at that time would have sent those states into the arms of the Confederacy, which almost certainly would have made it impossible for the Union to win the war.
So why issue the Emancipation Proclamation at all? Believe it or not, the Union was afraid that the South would free their slaves first. This would have given the CSA not only the moral superiority over the Union, but would have brought in the support of Europe as well, which could have very well have tipped the balance. The Emancipation Proclamation, while toothless, pulled the carpet out from under the Confederates and kept them from seizing the moral high ground for themselves.
Lincoln was also hoping that by hanging freedom in front of the Southern slaves, that they would desert their masters and come to the North. Without slave labor, the ability of the Confederate Army to fight would have been significantly reduced. For it was slave labor that allowed virtually every able-bodied white man to go into battle.
At that point in time, it was more important to save the Union then is was to end slavery. Lincoln was not a hypocrite. He said himself that saving the Union was paramount. If it took keeping slavery in place to save the Union, he would have done it. If it took repealing slavery, he would have done it. Or a combination of the two, he would have done it, as he ended up doing. For Lincoln, it was first save the Union, then the slavery question would resolve itself. But the Union must be saved first! And Lincoln turned out to be right for in the end, it was the Confederates who ended up setting their own slaves free when they finally decided to allow blacks to serve in the Confederate Army. All the top Confederate leaders knew that once they allowed blacks to fight side by side with white soldiers, that slavery was essentially over.
Same old southron song-and-dance, I see. Any decision you disagree with is suspect, any decision you agree with comes from a burning bush. So answer me this, would you expect the court to issue a decision BEFORE the fact?
The Southern States insisted they could secede legally. The Northern States said they could not. They fought a war about it, if I recall.
It's a little silly for someone to reason from a premise that is not agreed upon by the opposing side. That's called "begging the question." It's a common logical fallacy.
It won't be a convincing argument to those who believe that court has no authority over them, because their state does not belong to that government. As a matter of law, you are of course correct. But as a matter of debate, this is an endlessly circular argument.
I realize you were only responding to the existing argument with the counter position. I'm just pointing out that the argument isn't going to sway anyone on the opposing side, since the premises are not common.
And a special amount of weight when the SCOTUS Chief Justice was the same man as Secretary of Treasury that urged lincoln to start the war in the first place. Isn't that right, Non?
We both know the facts, whether you care to admit them or not. States north of the Confederacy had been threatening secession for decades. If the War of 1812 had not finished when it did, I sincerely believe that last paragraph of the Hartford Convention would have been carried out. Even the 'moderates' at the Convention while petitioning the government, and not listening to their more ardent members at the time, knew this would be a possibility, hence the arranging of the second meeting. Would it have happened then? Possibly but it was coming of that there can be no doubt. This of course is ignoring Massachusetts secession in 1803 among others. But ol' Sal answered the question once and for all in '69 didn't he?
We do know the facts, bill. There was no Massachussetts secession of '03 or Connecticut secession of '14 or anything else. Not a single state actually tried to carry out a threat to secede. Not a single indication that the federal government would have stood still for the actions. Presidents such as Jackson making it clear that individual states were not above the Constitution, regardless of how they felt.
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