"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, it we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." --
Samuel Adams, article published in 1771
***
According to Rhodes, in his "History of the United States," Vol. IV., page 344, he says; "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was not issued from a humane standpoint. Lincoln hoped it would incite the Negroes to rise against the women and children. "His Emancipation Proclamation was intended only as a punishment for the seceding states. It was with no thought of freeing the slaves of more than 300,000 slaveholders then in the North." His Emancipation Proclamation was issued for a fourfold purpose and it was issued with fear and trepidation lest he should offend his Northern constituents.
***
He did it: "First: Because of an oath - that if Lee should be driven from Maryland he would free the slaves." "Second: The time of enlistment had expired for many men in the army and he hoped this would encourage their re-enlistment." "Third: Trusting that Southern men would be forced to return
home to protect their wives and children from Negro insurrection." "Fourth: Above all he issued it to prevent foreign nations from recognizing the Confederacy."
Lincoln admitted that he thought that the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation would "result in the massacre of women and children in the South." No mass insurrection ever took place. The violence that did occur as result of Lincoln's document took place in the North.
In New York, the most violent riot ever in the United States took place as citizens protested against Lincoln's political maneuver coupled with his initiation of the draft. On July 13, 1863, in New York City, a riot broke out and raged for 3 days in what historian Burke Davis called "the nearest approach to revolution" during the entire war.
Mobs surged through the streets, burned buildings, and destroyed the drum from which the names of 1,200 New Yorkers had been drawn for military service. There were no soldiers to check the violence, due to the concentration of all available troops at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, so policemen and militia units had to face the rioters alone.
The angry mob burned fine homes, business buildings, the draft office, a Methodist church, a Negro orphanage, and many other buildings. A Negro was hung, then burned as people danced around the burning body. More than thirty Negroes were killed - shot, hung, or trampled to death. It had been reported that Negroes were hung from the lamp posts along the streets. The mobs grew to an estimated strength of between 50,000 and 70,000. For three days they swarmed through the streets, setting up barricades on First, Second, and Eighth Avenues, where sometimes a force of only 300 policemen would have to face 10,000 attackers at a time. Some troops filtered into town, and the crowds took to alleys and rooftops where they killed soldiers with bricks and guns. The gangs caught the colonel of a militia unit, stomping and beating him to death. After dragging him to his home, men, women, and children danced around his body. Eventually, enough troops arrived to put an end to the rioting. Casualties were heavy -nearly 2,000 people were dead from the melee.
Chaotic conditions in the North were in sharp contrast to those in the beleaguered Southland where one might have expected that the exigencies of war would necessitate curtailment of basic privileges, yet never was the writ of habeas corpus suspended during the lifetime of the Confederate States of America. Many soldiers in the U.S. Army, especially in the Western theater, laid down their arms due to Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. They refused to fight after finding that the federal government had implied that the war was, from that point, to be fought over the issue of slavery.
The Constitution protected slavery in peace, but in war, Lincoln came to believe, the commander in chief could abolish slavery as a military necessity. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1862, bore this military justification "This only freed salves in the States of Secession" , as did all of Lincoln's racial measures, including especially his decision in the final proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, to accept blacks in the army. By 1864, Democrats and Republicans differed clearly in their platforms on the race issue: Lincoln's endorsed the 13TH Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, whereas McClellan's pledged to return to the South the rights it had in 1860.
***
Gen. Donn Piatt re: Lincoln
I hear of him and read of him in eulogies and biographies, and fail to recognize the man I encountered for the first time in the canvass that called him from private life to be President of the United States. Piatt then goes on to describe a conference that he and General Schenck had with Lincoln in his home in Springfield. "I soon discovered that this strange and strangely gifted man, while not at all cynical, was a skeptic; his view of human nature was low; . . . he unconsciously accepted for himself and his party the same low line that he awarded the South. Expressing no sympathy for the slave, he laughed at the Abolitionists as a disturbing element easily controlled, without showing any dislike to the slave-holders. . . . We were not at a loss to get at the fact and the reason for it, in the man before us. Descended from the poor-whites of a slave State, through many generations, he inherited the contempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negroes. A self-made man, . . . his strong nature was built on what he inherited, and he could no more feel a sympathy with the abolition of slavery, but held fanatics, as Abolitionists were called, in utter abhorrence. While it seemed a cheap philanthropy, and therefore popular, to free another man's slave, the unrequited toil of the slave was more valuable to the North than to the South.
***
Lincoln, great emancipator and savior of the Blacks?
I have no purpose to introduce political or social equality between the white and negro race. There is a physical difference between the two which probably will forever forbid their living together on the same footing of equality. I, as well as any other man, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary. A.Lincoln
***
I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes,or of qualifying them to hold office....
A.L...9/15/1858
***
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery...
A.L 3/4/1861
***
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, letter to Horace Greeley,
A.L...." 8/22/1862
***
From the looks of the above, Lincoln's motive was something else. Seeing as how the slave's freedom was not an issue until he deemed it necessary to prolong the war. Lincoln's only real motive was Southern subjugation, and the end of State rights! ...PoP
***
"What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black
races." Abe Lincoln: From a speech in Springfield; 17 July 1858
***
We are a very odd animal, our only heroes are the bad guys. Can you not believe just a little that Lincoln was not a hero??
If we are not careful, the real heroes will be forgotten.
Slavery was and is wrong. "It is still an excepted practice in a few countries."
Reader be aware, I am against any form of subjugation or suppression...Whether it be of race, country, state, faith, culture, ethnic background or heritage.
It would be an uneducated man to state slavery was not an issue to some before and during the war For Southern Independence. It only became the greater issue for reasons noted below.
