Ahh, but they haven't been held up as the end all be all to the holy cause of the union and its no quarter war against the South just to end said practice are they? So it was common to be a member of the ACS. What of it? Face it, your hero could have cared less about the slaves and the falsehoods presented in the above article to paint him as some type of saint are getting tiresome. He was a big government thug and could care less about the Constitution. The exact thing that conservatives today are supposed to rally against. Except with abe we have to make an exception. We have to forget everything that is historically correct about the man, everything that would disgust a conservative if it were anyone else, and just remember his worthless political speeches
On the contrary, you may not agree with his ideas on colonization but Lincoln was against the institution of slavery, unlike your southron heroes, and said so on many occasions. The same cannot be said of the holy Davis and the sainted Lee. I've pointed this out before but considering the treatment shown towards free blacks down south prior to the war, and given that their welcome up North wasn't very warm either, and in light of what the south tried to pull off after the war with their Black Codes, was Lincoln doing them any harm suggesting that they might be better of carving a new life for themselves overseas? Someplace where they could run their own lives and their own societies free in a way that southern whites would never voluntarily allow? In retrospect we are a better country for having an integrated society, but I would not have wanted to go through what blacks went through in the 100 years following the war.
Silly Bear. Robert E. Lee has been presented as the "end all be all to the holy cause" of the South. Take Lee as some kind of spotless hero, and you can't attack Lincoln for having agreed with him at some point about colonization.
And this "Lincoln: Saint or Demon" thinking is shallow and stale. Lincoln clearly did care about slavery -- in large part because he cared about freedom, but also because he wasn't deaf to the injustice done to the slaves. He wasn't a 21st century egalitarian or welfare state coddler, but he was fully aware of the evil of slavery.
Nor is it the case that Lincoln was a "big government thug." He supported protective tariffs, federal currency, and public support for railroad construction. So did many Americans of his generation and the next. That's hardly a recipe for tyranny or leviathan. If you look at things honestly, you are probably in favor of more big government, whether at the state or federal level than Lincoln was. Most Americans today certainly are. When it came down to it, the Confederate government was as well.
Nor is conservative respect for Lincoln some "exception." We also respect Washington, though he advocated the replacement of the loose Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, which increased the powers of the federal government. Joe Sobran and others have expressed a preference for the Articles of Confederation over the Constitution, but it's not clear that retaining the Articles would really have made us freer, happier or more secure. Indeed, it's also doubtful that the success of the Confederacy would have left most of us freer than we are now, though mythology makes many think so.
Your assessment is absolutely correct. It is no longer about Abe Lincoln the man and what he did or did not do. It is about The Lincoln, a diefied concept of political idolatry for those who flock around him.
Some defenders of The Lincoln deny this situation's existence, and individually that is entirely possible. But evidence exists that it is there, the strongest piece being the radical inability of certain idolaters to concede any form of human or political flaw whatsoever in their item of worship, The Lincoln.
Some who practice this idolatry adamantly deny it in words, but not in their actions. Take Walt for example. Just look at the extreme efforts he exerts to deny or excuse even the simplest of flaws on the part of The Lincoln, some of them so extreme that even his associates back away. He simply cannot concede the constitutional error of suspending habeas corpus, or that of ignoring a federal court decision denying him the suspension privilege he exerted. Nor can he concede that any wrong of any fashion was committed against innocent southerners by yankee armies. Instead he denies the rapes and murders ever happened by pushing a history that leaves them out, and when presented with indisputable evidence to the contrary, he ignores it or belittles and downplays it because he cannot fathom the alternative - having to admit that The Lincoln and his general Sherman were thoroughly flawed and sinful human beings capable of perpetrating a wrong.
Walt is the extreme case, but this passage from the kinkos pamphlet by Ferrier shows the same tendencies. The human person of Abraham Lincoln indisputably subscribed to and publicly espoused racist beliefs. Any individual who recognizes that Abe Lincoln was a flawed and worldly human being has no problem recognizing this, accepting it as so, and moving on. The Lincoln's idolaters cannot do that though as, again, it would require they concede a flaw which they simply cannot do, be it large or ever so slight. Instead they perpetrate the fraud of arguing at length that when The Lincoln made racist statements, he was really not making racist statements or at least not believing them. In doing so they rely upon lines of rationalization so extreme and so intense that they preserve The Lincoln's infallability in their own minds. The rest of us see it for what it is - that linguistic process that Lincoln himself once described as reaching a horse chestnut out of a chestnut horse.
Call it claremonster worship under the Abratollah Jaffa, the cult of Harry, whatever it may be - the idolatrous worship of a false diety known as The Lincoln exists among certain members of conservative circles and, in its presence, detracts from the greater good to be gained out of conservatism by attempting to reorient us around what is at its core a falsehood, an idolatrous lie.