so you agree he was a racist?
At one point maybe. Not when he freed the slaves. If he still was, it took great courage to go against his beliefs and free them. Nevermind he was assassinated for his trouble.
You ever think about that seriously? Why not freedom proclamation?
The definition of the word "emancipate" is to "make free" to "liberate", to "let loose".
I don't see it necessary to parse words, do you?
The US names thing a certain way for a reason. It comes from a Latin word that means "transfer property" Basically the enslaved were transferred to the government as property.
early 17th century: from Latin emancipat- ‘transferred as property’, from the verb emancipare, from e- (variant of ex- ) ‘out’ + mancipium ‘slave’
Please. You are making this all to easy.
Thank me later.
Read the post again, edited.
Lincoln stayed a racist until the end of his days.
When President Abraham Lincoln met with free black leaders in 1862, what did he propose?
Here’s how he addressed the free black delegation: “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.”
This is the Abraham Lincoln they didn’t tell you about in school.
As the free black leaders soon discovered, Lincoln’s invitation to discuss policy was a pretext for a one-sided sales pitch.
“I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal,” Lincoln continued. “I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.”
Lincoln continued to unload on the delegates, even blaming their people for the Civil War at his doorstep: “See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.”
This brought the president back to colonization, and his purpose for inviting the delegates to the White House in the first place—to get them to accept his trial balloon.
“I suppose one of the principal difficulties in the way of colonization is that the free colored man cannot see that his comfort would be advanced by it,” Lincoln reasoned. “You may believe you can live in Washington or elsewhere in the United States the remainder of your life [as easily], perhaps more so than you can in any foreign country, and hence you may come to the conclusion that you have nothing to do with the idea of going to a foreign country. This is (I speak in no unkind sense) an extremely selfish view of the case.”
Then he pivoted: “But you ought to do something to help those who are not so fortunate as yourselves.”
In Lincoln’s mind, if these free leaders stepped forward to lead the emigration of black people out of the United States, that would make it easier for white slaveholders to free the rest.
He explained: “If you could give a start to white people, you would open a wide door for many to be made free. If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning, and whose intellects are clouded by Slavery, we have very poor materials to start with. If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed.”
Nothing like flattering some of the race by insulting the rest!
“There is much to encourage you,” Lincoln continued pitching. “For the sake of your race you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people.”
Lincoln even laid a George Washington guilt trip on them, even though, based on what he was saying, they weren’t really American enough to claim the liberties Washington had secured. “In the American Revolutionary war,” he told them, “sacrifices were made by men engaged in it; but they were cheered by the future. Gen. Washington himself endured greater physical hardships than if he had remained a British subject. Yet he was a happy man, because he was engaged in benefiting his race.”
After reviewing the pros and cons of Africa as a destination, Lincoln started pushing Central America as his destination of choice. After all, he said, Liberia was far from African Americans’ birthplace in the United States, and even if they weren’t all that fond of white people, he could understand wanting to be close to their forcibly adopted “motherland.”
“It does not strike me that you have the greatest reason to love [white people],” he said, exempting himself. “But still you are attached to them at all events.”
As crazy as it sounds now, Central America fit the bill for Lincoln, because, as he explained, “t is nearer to us than Liberia—not much more than one-fourth as far as Liberia, and within seven days' run by steamers. Unlike Liberia it is on a great line of travel—it is a highway. The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages, and especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land—thus being suited to your physical condition.”
Here was the old Thomas Jefferson canard with a Central American twist: Despite years of forced interracial mixing on Southern plantations, African Americans somehow were, in Lincoln’s estimation, more physically suited for certain geographies over white people—namely, hot places. Lincoln even had a specific industry in mind once the free black leaders and their families arrived in Central America: “rich coal mines.”
“Coal land is the best thing I know of with which to commence an enterprise,” Lincoln argued. And one thing white and black people had in common was that they “look to their self-interest.”
It’s odd to us, obviously, that Lincoln minimized the brutal conditions of coal mining (though, at that point, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House had been out for 10 years). Yet it was no more odd than Lincoln’s way of appealing to African-American leaders based on shared American values (steeped as they were in the teachings of Benjamin Franklin and others) in an effort to get them to quit the country on which those values were founded.
For his close, Lincoln told the delegates, “If you will engage in the enterprise I will spend some of the money intrusted [sic] to me. I am not sure you will succeed. The Government may lose the money, but we cannot succeed unless we try; but we think, with care, we can succeed.” Bottom line: Lincoln needed them to enlist.
“If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men,” he said, “with a mixture of women and children, good things in the family relation, I think I could make a successful commencement.” (What he didn’t tell them was that he had already been moving the pieces into place behind the scenes for a specific landing at Chiriquí, today a province of Panama but then part of Colombia. The plan had the potential to relocate more than 10,000 free blacks to a colony the U.S. government would purchase. You can read more about Chiriquí in Foner’s book.)
With that, the president left them to think about it … “for the good of mankind.”
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