Perspective: Die-hard Confederates should be reconstructed

probably HTR IS proud of the rape of the south;he is one of the many kool aide drinkers of the damnyankee sort.

he SHOULD be ashamed, but alas he is too blind/dumb to be.

free dixie,sw

Uncilivilzed, barbarous, ignorant, stupid, malevolent, evil, illiterate. Underrstand? Burn that trash rag so people don't know you ever had one.

This was interesting:

On April 14th 1864, William Ferguson of the US Navy penned a report of what he saw when he arrived at Fort Pillow after the battle. In that report it stated:

"All the wounded who had strength enough to speak agreed that after the fort was taken an indiscriminate slaughter of our troops was carried on by the enemy with a furious and vindictive savageness which was never equaled by the most merciless of the Indian tribes. Around on every side horrible testimony to the truth of this statement could be seen. Bodies with gaping wounds, some bayoneted through the eyes, some with skulls beaten through, others with hideous wounds as if their bowels had been ripped open with bowie-knives, plainly told that but little quarter was shown to our troops. Strewn from the fort to the river bank, in the ravines and hollows, behind logs and under the brush where they had crept for protection from the assassins who pursued them, we found bodies bayoneted, beaten, and shot to death, showing how cold-blooded and persistent was the slaughter of our unfortunate troops.

Of course, when a work is carried by assault there will always be more or less bloodshed, even when all resistance has ceased; but here there were unmistakable evidences of a massacre carried on long after any resistance could have been offered, with a cold-blooded barbarity and perseverance which nothing can palliate." This report can be found in the Official Records, Series 1, volume 32 part 1.

The next day Cpt. William T. Smith of the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery wrote a statement about his arrival at Fort Pillow after the battle in which he declared that "I passed over the field of battle under the flag of truce (which was out to bury our dead), and I there saw men who were shot after they had thrown down their arms and were in hiding-places that they had selected after the fort was taken. A captain of one of the gun-boats informed me that the rebel General Chalmers told him they did not intend to show any mercy to the garrison of Fort Pillow when they attacked the same. When I went over the field I was under the escort of Colonel Greer, who informed me that it was the hardest battle that he was ever in--the most strongly contested. The appearance of a great many of the dead men's bodies showed to me conclusively that they were murdered." This can be found in the same section of the Official Records.

Also in the same portion of the Official Records, and written within a few days of the battle is the statement of F.A. Smith and William Cleary of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry (USA). These two, the only surviving officers of their regiment, wrote that "a scene of terror and massacre ensued." They describe men who had surrendered being executed including several officers who they identify by name, one executed on the direct order of Forrest and another who was nailed to the side of a house and then burned alive. They include the gruesome account of how "The rebels also went to the negro hospital, where about 30 sick were kept, and butchered them with their sabers, hacking their heads open in many instances, and then set fire to the buildings."

--From the moderated ACW newsgroup.

Walt

Sounds like a Lousiana constitutional convention from 1867, one in which 147 Americans of African heritage came unarmed and were killed and dismembered with knives. You may enjoy this:

Farewell Address:

Citizens of New Orleans: - It may not be inappropriate, as it is not inopportune in occasion, that there should be addressed to you a few words at parting, by one whose name is to be hereafter indissolubly connected with your city.

I shall speak in no bitterness, because I am not conscious of a single personal animosity. Commanding the Army of the Gulf, I found you captured, but not surrendered; conquered, but not orderly; relieved from the presence of an army but incapable of taking care of yourselves. I restored order, punished crime, opened commerce, brought provision to your starving people, reformed your currency, and gave you quiet protection, such as you had not enjoyed for many years.

While doing this, my soldiers were subjected to obloquy, reproach, and insult.

And now, speaking to you, who know the truth, I here declare that whoever has quietly remained about his business, affording neither aid not comfort to the enemies of the United States, has never been interfered with by the soldiers of the United States.

The men who had assumed to govern you and to defend your city in arms having fled, some of your women flouted at the presence of those who came to protect them. By a simple order (No. 28), I called upon every soldier of this army to treat the women of New Orleans as gentlemen should deal with the sex, with such effect that I now call upon the just-mined ladies of New Orleans to say whether they have ever enjoyed so complete protection and calm quiet for themselves and their families as since the advent of the United States troops.

The enemies of my country, unrepentant and implacable, I have treated with merited severity. I hold that rebellion is treason, and that treason persisted in is death, and any punishment short of that due a traitor gives so much clear gain to him from the clemency of the government. Upon this thesis have I administered the authority of the United States, because of which I am not unconscious of complaint. I do not feel that I have erred in too much harshness, for that harshness has ever been exhibited to disloyal enemies to my country and not to loyal friends. To be sure, I might have regaled you with the amenities of British civilization, and yet been within the supposed rules of civilized warfare. You might have been smoked to death in caverns, as were the Covenantors of Scotland by the command of a general of the royal house of England; or roasted, like the inhabitants of Algiers during the French campaign; your wives and daughters might have been give over to the ravisher, as were the unfortunate dames of Spain in the Peninsular War; or you might have been scalped and tomahawked as our mothers were at Wyoming by the savage allies of Great Britain in our own Revolution; your property could have been turned over to indiscriminate 'loot,' like the palace of the Emperor of China, works of art which adorned your buildings might have been sent away, like the paining of the Vatican; your sons might have been blown from the mouths of cannon, like the Sepoys at Delhi; and yet all this would have been within he rules of civilized warfare as practiced by the most polished and the most hypocritical nations of Europe. For such acts the records of the doings of some of the inhabitants o your city toward the friends of the Union, before my coming, were a sufficient provocative and justification.

But I have not so conducted. On the contrary, the worst punishment inflicted, except for criminal acts punishable by every law, has been banishment with labor to a barren island, where I encamped my own soldier before marching here.

It is true, I have levied upon the wealthy rebels, and paid out nearly half a million of dollars to feed forty thousand of the starving poor of all nations assembled here, made so by this war.

I saw that this Rebellion was a war of the aristocrats against the middling men, of the rich against the poor; a war of the land-owner against the laborer; that it was a struggle for the retention of power in the hands of the few against the many; and I found no conclusion to it, save in the subjugation of the few and the disenthrallment of the many.. I therefore felt no hesitation in taking he substance of the wealthy, who had caused the war, to feed the innocent poor, who had suffered by the war. And I shall now leave you with the proud consciousness that I carry with me the blessing of the humble and loyal., under the roof of the cottage and in the cabin of the save, and so am quite content to incur the sneers of the salon, or the curses of the rich.

I have found you trembling at the terrors of servile insurrection. All danger of this I have prevented by so treating the slave that he had no cause to rebel.

I found the dungeon, the chain, and the lash your only means of enforcing obedience in your servants. I leave them peaceful, laborious, controlled by the laws of kindness and justice.

I have demonstrated that the pestilence can be kept from your borders.

I have added a million of dollars to your wealth in the form of new land from the batture of the Mississippi.

I have cleanse and improved your streets, canals, and public squares, and opened new avenues to unoccupied land.

I have given you freedom of elections greater than you have ever enjoyed before.

I have cause justice to be administered so impartially that your own advocates have unanimously complimented the judges of my appointment.

You have seen, therefore, the benefit of the laws and justice of the government against which you have rebelled.

Why, then, will you not all return to your allegiance to that government, - not with lip-service, but with the heart?

I conjure you, if you desire ever to see renewed prosperity, giving business to your streets and wharves - if you hope to see your city become again the market of the western world, fed by its rivers for more than three thousand miles, draining he commerce of a country greater than the mind of man hater ever conceived - return to your allegiance.

If you desire to leave to your children the inheritance you received from your fathers - a stable constitutional government; if you desire that they should in the future be a portion of the greatest empire the sun ever shone upon - return to your allegiance.

There is but one thing that stands in the way.

There is but one thing that at this hour stands between you and the government- and that is slavery.

The institution, cursed of God, which had taken its last refuge here, in His providence will be rooted our as the tares from the wheat, although the wheat be torn up with it.

I have given much thought to this subject.

I came among you, by teachings, by habit of mind, by political position, by social affinity, inclined to sustain your domestic laws, if by possibility they might be with safety to the Union.

Months of experience and observation have forced the conclusion that the existence of slavery is incompatible with the safety either of yourselves or of the Union. As the system has gradually grown to its present huge dimensions, it were best if it could be gradually removed; but it is better, far better, that it should be taken out as once, than that it should longer vitiate the social, political and family relations of your country. I am speaking with no philanthropic views as regards the slave, but simply of the effect of slavery on the master. See for yourselves.

Look around you and say whether this saddening, deadening influence has not all but destroyed the very framework of your society?

I am speaking the farewell words of one who has shown his devotion to this country at the risk of his life and fortune, who in the words can have neither hope hope nor interest, save the good of those whom he addresses.; and let me here repeat, with all the solemnity of an appeal to heaven to bear me witness, that such are the views forced upon by experience.

Come then, to the unconditional support of the government. Take into your own hands your own institution; remodel them according to the laws of nations and of God, and thus attain that great prosperity assured to you by geographical position, only a portion of which was heretofore yours

Benj. F. Butler

New Orleans, Dec 24, 1862

I didn't know we had titles of nobility in this country...

It's the traditional form of address for a state governor. Any second grader from a 19th century New England grammar school could have told you that. Besides his years in the House before and after the war, his rank as second highest officer in the Union army, and his run for the presidency, he was also Governor of Massachusetts.

It's the traditional form of address for a state governor.

"The Honorable XYZ" and simply "Governor XYZ" are the standard addresses of today, and then only in person or direct reference to their tenure.

Any second grader from a 19th century New England grammar school could have told you that.

Newsflash: this isn't the 19th century and I don't live in New England.

'Excellency' was the Constitutional correct title for the Governor of Massachusetts when he held office. He got it fair and square. Besides, you Southern boys all owe him more than you could ever dare hope to repay him.

Besides, you Southern boys all owe him more than you could ever dare hope to repay him.

No thank you. I'm still waiting for him to pay for all the spoons he stole.

There were two people present. One died a week later. The other wrote up his recollections of the meeting in detail. No credible reason whatsoever exists as to why those details would be wrong. Live with it.

It's inconsistent with what President Lincoln said before. There is no reason to give it credence.

"Congress may apprpriate money and otherwise provide, for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States."

-- A. Lincoln, 12/01/62

You can't show in the record that Lincoln's position ever went beyond that.

What the record shows, in fact, is that he dropped this position entirely and supported full rights for blacks.

Walt

[Wlat] It's inconsistent with what President Lincoln said before. There is no reason to give it credence.

Benjamin Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler (Boston: 1892), pp. 903-908.; Quoted in: Charles H. Wesley, "Lincoln's Plan for Colonizing the Emancipated Negroes," The Journal of Negro History, Vol. IV, No. 1 (January 1919), p. 20.; Earnest S. Cox, Lincoln's Negro Policy (Torrance, Calif.: 1968), pp. 62-64.; Paul J. Scheips, "Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project," The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October 1952), pp. 448-449. In the view of historian H. Belz, the essence of what Butler reports that Lincoln said to him here is "in accord with views ... [he] expressed elsewhere concerning reconstruction." See: Herman Belz, Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy During the Civil War (Ithaca: 1969), pp. 282-283. Cited in: N. Weyl and W. Marina, American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro (1971), p. 233 (n. 44).

What Butler said has been corroborated and authenticated by multiple reputable historians.

Scores of historians have spent countless hours trying to discredit Butler and his story. but since it is impossible to prove a nagative, and since, as other historians have pointed out, Butler's account is "full and circumstantial" and there was no reason for him to lie, these efforts have proved fruitless. More to the point, Lincoln said the same thing about colonization and his fear of Black violence to others (see page 615). Based on these and other factors, some scholars, Ludwell H. Johnson (68) and Herman Belz (282) among them, have concluded that there is no reason to doubt the butler account. "If Butler's recollection is substantially correct, as it appears to be," George Frederickson said, "then one can only conclude that Lincoln continued to his dying day to deny the possibility of racial harmony and equality in the United States and persisted in regarding colonization as the only real alternative to perpetual race conflict" (57)
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 167
Citations:
Belz, Herman, Reconstructing the Union. Ithaca, 1969.
Frederickson, George M. "A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality," Journal of Southern History 41 (February 1975): 39-58.
Johnson, Ludwell. "Lincoln and Equal Rights: The Authenticity of the Wadsworth Letter," Journal of Southern History 32 (Sept. 1966): 83-7

Congressman Julian, who conferred with Lincoln often as a member of the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct ofthe War, used almost the same words, saying that when Lincoln "very reluctantly issued his preliminary proclamation ... he wished it distinctly understood that the deportation of the slaves was, in his min, inseparably connected with the policy" (RR 61)
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 510
Citation:
Allen T. Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time. New York, 1888.

Looking back later, Rev. Mitchell said, according to an interview published in the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, August 26, 1894, that he asked a Presbyterian pastor to recommend a local man who could help him organize Illinois for the American Colonization Society. The pastor recommended Lincoln, who didn't, Mitchell said, look like much but who had a firm grasp of the politics of colonization and what Mitchell had done in Indiana. Lincoln was thirty-four years old when he met Mitchell. What did he believe? He "earnestly believed in and advocated colonization as a means of solving 'the race problem,'" Mitchell said. The two men became friends or at least associates, and Lincoln later names Mitchell commissioner of [Black] emigration in the Lincoln administration.
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 226

This was not an ad hoc political tactic or a hastily devised response to the pressure of events -- this was, Lincoln's emigration aide Rev. James Mitchell told the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat on August 16, 1894, the foundation of Lincoln's private and public policy. It was "his honest conviction that it was better for both races to separate. This was the central point of his policy, around which hung all his private views, and as far as others would let him, his public acts" [Italics added] Lincoln was "fully convinced" that "the republic was already dangerously encumbered with African blood that would not legally mix with American [sic] . . . . He regarded a mixed race as eminently anti-republican, because of the heterogeneous character it gives the population where it exists, and for similar reasons he did not favor the annexation of tropical lands encumbers with mixed races ...."
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 384

Lincoln's emigration aide, the Rev. James Mitchell, said the Proclamation "did not change Mr. Lincoln's policy of colonization, nor was it so intended." On August 18, 1863, seven months after the signing of the Proclamation and three months before the Gettysburg Address, Mitchell said he asked Lincoln if the "might say that colonization was still the policy of the Administration." Lincoln replied twice, he said, that "I have never thought so much on any subject and arrived at a conclusion so definite as I have in this case, and in after years found myself wrong." Lincoln added that "it would have been much better to separate the races than to have such scenes as those in New York [during the Draft Riots] the other day, where Negroes were hanged to lamp posts."
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 554

What the evil political pimp Lincoln said in public cannot be reconciled with what he did when not in public. This is very much like your other hero, William Jefferson Blyth Clinton.

The evil political pimp Lincoln appointed and supported the sick, perverted, twisted James Mitchell for years as the Agent of [Black] Emigration, i.e., Commissioner of Ethnic Cleansing.

Our Visit to Richmond
Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Gilmore do journalism

PROPAGANDA 101

=====

|LINK|

Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois.

From James R. Gilmore to Abraham Lincoln, August 3, 1864

No 37 West Cedar St. Boston,

Aug 3. 1864

My dear Mr Lincoln;

I send you herewith, as promised, proof of "Our Visit to Richmond" for the next "Atlantic"¹

[Note 1 Gilmore's article appeared under the pseudonym "Edmund Kirke" in the September 1864 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The article recounted his visit to Richmond with Col. James F. Jaquess. See Gilmore to Lincoln, July 21, 1864, as well as numerous other letters in this collection.]

If you wish any part of it altered, suppressed, or added to, please advise me by the 7th inst. and I will govern myself by your wishes. If I do not hear from you, I shall conclude it is not objectionable and will let it go to press. v I am,

very respy & truly

Yours,

J. R. Gilmore.

=====

Statistically speaking, any spoons he requisitioned from traitors were cashed in to pay to feed your ancestors.

Statistically speaking, any spoons he requisitioned from traitors were cashed in to pay to feed your ancestors.

Not really. My ancestors fed themselves with their own crops...that is, until Robert Milroy came along, shot a bunch of them in cold blood, burned down their farm, and hauled off with all the valuables as part of the yankee war loot.

It's inconsistent with what President Lincoln said before.

No it's not. Butler's account is very similar to the plan proposed by Lincoln's colonization agent James Mitchell a few years earlier (interestingly enough Mitchell advised on the cover letter to it that Lincoln put off his large scale plan until the war was over and funds were available for it). Lincoln evidently must have tolerated that proposal because he never fired Mitchell and in fact fought to keep Mitchell on the job and continuing his colonization schemes after the Sec. of Interion requested to fire him.

That was after Fort Pillow, was it not? In any case, the war in the mountains was truly brutal, and truly a civil war. Crucifixtions were common, though it was usually done with ropes through the heels. As they say, what goes around comes around.

That kind of ignorant nonsense makes the Sherman look like a Saint.

That was after Fort Pillow, was it not?

Some of it was. Other acts of yankee brutality there came long before the severely overplayed battle of Fort Pillow.

In any case, the war in the mountains was truly brutal, and truly a civil war. Crucifixtions were common, though it was usually done with ropes through the heels.

Probably. Another common tactic of Gen. Milroy was to hang civilians with a slip knot on doorframes. He would let them struggle in agony while ordering his soldiers to give tugs on their legs and make the death more painful. There was also a case where one of the yankee leaders and his band mutilated and tortured a suspected confederate. Perhaps the most blatant is documented in Milroy's own military orders. It is a 50+ person murder list that instructs soldiers to track down southern civilians for execution and list the bizarre and cruel manners in which those executions are to be carried out. One of them orders the men to stage an "accidental shooting" of the mother of a confederate soldier while they were supposedly searching her house. Another orders them to take some civilians prisoner and hand them over to a local unionist informant who would then be permitted to torture them to death. It was apparently the unionists' "reward" for spying on his neighbors.

|LINK|

"In Lowell Butler studied at Lowell High School; he also established a practice of stealing items from rooms of the boarding house tenants while they were at work according to one of Butler's biographers [Chester G. Hearn, When The Devil Came Down to Dixie: Bent Butler in New Orleans (1997), pp. 8-9]. Hearn goes on to suggest that Butler's early proclivities were life-long:

Butler died on January 11, 1893, an immensely wealthy man whose estate topped $7million. Nobody has ever been able to explain how Butler, who came from simple means and spent the bulk of his career alternating between law and politics, amassed so huge a fortune (Ibid., p. 6).

[Walt 968] What the record shows, in fact, is that he dropped this position entirely and supported full rights for blacks.

Lincoln never supported full rights for Blacks. It is what he DID that counts. What he DID was to help create, and then support, a Louisiana constitution that did not give such rights to Blacks.

LINCOLN'S LAST CABINET MEETING

Excerpted from:
Lincoln and Johnson
Their Plan of Reconstruction and the Resumption of National Authority
First Paper
by Gideon Welles
Galaxy Magazine, April 1872, pp. 526

He thought it providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned, and there were none of the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us. If we were wise and discreet, we should reanimate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing the the Union reestablished, before Congress came together in December. This he thought important. We could do better; accomplish more without than with them.

* * *

There was too much of a desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there was too little respect for their rights. He did not sympathize in these feelings. Louisiana, he said, had framed and presented one of the best constitutions that had ever been formed. He wished they had permitted negroes who had property, or could read, to vote; but this was a question which they must decide for themselves.

Yet some, a very few of our friends, were not willing to let the people of the States determine these questions, but, in violation of first and fundamental principles, would exercise arbitrary power over them. These humanitarians break down all State rights and constitutional rights. Had the Louisianians inserted the negro in their Constitution, and had that instrument been in all other respects the same, Mr. Sumner, he said, would never have excepted to that Constitution. The delegation would have been admitted, and the State all right.

"Of course, secession is neither rebellion nor insurrection."

Andrew Jackson made the same point in his "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina" during the nullification crisis. "The Constitution," said Jackson, "derives its whole authority from the people, not the States. The States "retained all the power they did not grant. But each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation, can not, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation ..."

Jackson said, "(S)ecession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms."

From The Case Against Secession by Mackubin T. Ownes

Didn't you quote from Look Away! earlier in this thread? I think you were doubtful about some of Davis's quotations.

Although I don't agree with some of your conclusions, I appreciate that you are very well read, and make mention of your sources. You have mentioned a couple of Davis's works in past threads. I make mental notes and look for these resources on my trips to B&N. As a habit, I don't bookmark the WBTS threads - they get very repetitious sometimes.

I am reading All Laws But One by William Rehnquist right now. have you read it?

"Bennett correctly points out that Lincoln was a supporter of colonization. But supporting colonization is not the same as preferring it. Lincoln believed it was one small answer to the larger problem confronting Blacks in a racist society. What the readers of Forced Into Glory should know is that Lincoln advocated voluntary colonization. No Black was forced to leave the country against his or her free will. Only those who wanted to leave were offered the opportunity. The great majority declined, a few did not.

In one instance, Lincoln had approved a contract with an unscrupulous contractor to set up a colony on the Ile de Vache off the coast of Haiti. When Lincoln learned that several hundred Blacks had been abandoned without proper support, he ordered the United States Navy to bring the Blacks back to the United States. If Lincoln's plan was to rid the country of Blacks by deportation, he showed poor judgement in returning those Blacks who had already been deported.

Whatever Lincoln believed in his heart regarding social equality, he believed slavery was morally wrong, and he said so on numerous occasions: "If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." His views were well known to southern leaders, which is why they rejected his presidency. When Confederate peace commissioners met at Hampton Roads in 1865, Lincoln was willing to entertain terms of peace and reunion, but only on the condition that slavery was not a negotiating point. Lincoln insisted that any peace proposal include ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.

To help facilitate acceptance of peace with abolition, Lincoln proposed compensating southern slaveholders to the tune of 400 million dollars to free their slaves. Lincoln had earlier expressed these same views in a letter to Horace Greeley concerning "The Niagara Peace Conference" held in 1864. Lincoln wrote that any peace agreement must embrace "the abandonment of slavery." This position belies Bennett's claim that Lincoln was a white supremacist whose every effort was to prolong slavery until such time as all Blacks could be deported leaving a "lily-White America" -- Bennett's words.

Mr. Bennett's distortion of Lincoln's "racial" policy is not restricted to Blacks. An excellent example of Bennett's style of making "white of black and black of white" is his account of Lincoln's actions regarding the Sioux Indian uprising in Minnesota. In August 1862, hostilities broke out between the Sioux nation in Minnesota and settlers of that state. When the fighting ended, over 400 white settlers were dead. The army captured over 1,500 Indian prisoners, including 1,000 women and children. A military commission was set up to try those Indians accused of atrocities. In the end, 303 Indians were sentenced to hang. Lincoln objected to what he viewed as wholesale slaughter. He wired the commanding officer to stay the executions and forward the "full and complete record of each conviction." He also ordered that any material which would discriminate the most guilty from the least guilty be included with the trial transcripts.

Lincoln then sat down with his Justice Department lawyers and reviewed every case. Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to approve the executions both to intimidate the Indians and to satisfy the white settlers' thirst for revenge. Both the military leaders and the politicians in Minnesota warned Lincoln that anything less than large-scale hangings would result in outrage and more violence against the Indians. Lincoln held firm and pardoned 265 of the 303 condemned Indians, approving a total of 38 cases.

Mr. Bennett focuses only on the 38 and refers to Lincoln's decision as "hard-hearted," and as an example of Lincoln's "double standard" when it came to questions of race. Bennett writes that Lincoln "approved one of the largest mass executions in military history," suggesting that he was motivated to kill Indians because he never forgot that an Indian "sneaked up behind his grandfather and killed him while he was working in a field." Bennett stops short of calling Lincoln's act "ethnic cleansing." He saves that offensive term to describe Lincoln's colonization policy.

Mr. Bennett's revisionist approach to history is not new. What makes his latest work so sensational is not his revisionist approach, but his subject. Abraham Lincoln has become a universal symbol of human ideals. Toppling such an icon is not an easy task. Anyone who seeks to bring down Lincoln will have to do more than cry fraud. Putting dreams in Lincoln's head ("Lincoln dreamed of an all-White nation") or putting someone else's words in his mouth ("the n----- question") will not do the job. While it may titillate the few, it will not convince the many.

Throughout his 627 pages of text, Mr. Bennett does not seem to understand what Lincoln knew so well: Union victory meant the end to slavery. Lincoln didn't stop with abolition, however. In his speech from the White House balcony on April 11, 1865, Lincoln began moving the country forward in the only way that would insure success -- he advocated Negro suffrage in small, sure steps. No amount of drum beating by Mr. Bennett can diminish the revolutionary significance of this act.

While it is important to focus on what Abraham Lincoln did as opposed to what he said, it would do Mr. Bennett and the rest of us well to heed Lincoln's words to his young law partner, Billy Herndon: "History is not history unless it is the truth."

Walt