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I don't see how the quote has been taken out of context. That quote among many others make it very clear that Lincoln never was in favor of "full equality for b

• smacktoward 12y ago
  > At the beginning of his presidency he promoted an amendment to the constitution which would have permanently protect slavery and forbid it from being outlawed. There were several such measures being mooted during the "secession crisis" of 1861, when the Southern states were still in the union but threatening to pull out. (See, for example, the Corwin Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment) They were all desperate attempts to forestall secession by pre-emptively giving the South what it was thought they wanted. Once secession went from being a threat to an actual fact, there was no point to such measures anymore, and they were all quickly dropped. Given the scope of the tragedy that the war would bring, it's not hard to have sympathy for leaders who grasped for something, anything, that could stop it from happening. But that's all these proposals were -- frantic attempts to head off a looming disaster. They don't reflect actual policy preferences. > On another occasion he suggested that blacks should be exiled back to Africa. Indeed, he did raise the issue of "colonization" (as it was called at the time) at several points early in his presidency. It's not like he invented the idea; it was a common proposal among Northern conservatives, among whom the only thing less popular than black slavery was black people themselves. But he never pushed it hard, because it was the conservatives' idea, not really his; and besides, nobody was enthusiastic about it, least of all Northern blacks. His Administration never put the muscle behind it they put behind, say, passing the 13th Amendment. > I could cite many more of his words making it abundantly clear he was not in favor of black equality. You're conflating black emancipation with black equality, which to white 19th century Americans were two very different things. Emancipation was broadly popular in the North, but that didn't mean Northerners saw blacks as their equals in any real respect. They thought they were inferior creatures, but inferior creatures who shouldn't be enslaved. Lincoln never got to the point where he embraced equality as strongly as he embraced emancipation, but by the end of the war he'd gotten closer to it than any other American statesman of his age -- or of the next 100 years, for that matter. Certainly he felt more for African-Americans as human beings than did any President for decades after. > Why, if there was such a coalition, was it necessary for Lincoln to ignore the supreme court's decision against the illegal ending of habeus corpus, arrest and exile a congress man, and imprison countless northern journalists who wrote opposing the war? Because there was a civil war going on, and as a practical fact he had to keep border states like Maryland and Kentucky from being dragged out of the union if he wanted to win it. There was no way around that fact. To lose the border states would have been to lose the whole game. So, when hardness was necessary, he was willing to be hard.
  • ancap 12y ago
    >You're conflating black emancipation with black equality, >Because there was a civil war going on, and as a practical fact he had to keep border states like Maryland and Kentucky from being dragged out of the union if he wanted to win it. You're proving my point. The aim of the war was not for black equality.