“...As long as blacks live with whites
they constitute a threat to national life.”
~Abraham Lincoln
Nowadays, few question Abraham Lincoln’s great fulfilled ambition, the emancipation of America’s slaves. His is one of the greatest monuments in Washington, DC.
Does any civilized man doubt that the enslavement of a human being is evil, pure and simple? But read on, perhaps you will find a view of historical facts which has so far escaped you.
Like many Yankees leading up to America’s Civil War, we despise slavery of any kind. However our respect for Mr. Lincoln begins to wobble when it comes to his methods. In a despicable example of how some believe ends justify means, Lincoln set into motion a tidal wave of death, destruction and economic strife which affects America to this very day. The War was avoidable! Lincoln could have brought about the emancipation of America’s slaves by other means, probably avoiding his own untimely death. Not just the North, but World sentiment was turning sharply against the very notion of slavery. It was only a matter of time. Had Lincoln’s willingness to negotiate with his adversaries been as determined as his willingness to take America to war against itself, today’s America might find itself in a better place at least as regards race relations.
Lincoln’s controversial wave began surging with a great disagreement as to whether or not America’s newly acquired western territories would be allowed by Constitutional law to hold slaves. This disagreement led to the secession of seven southern states, including Texas, and then several others, which went on to form the Confederacy. Secession was not allowed by the Constitution, Lincoln insisted, and so as Commander-in-Chief he believed he was authorized by that document to bring the Confederacy back to the Union by the force of war. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. He plunged America into its Civil War.
Lincoln’s rationale for America’s Civil War seems to be something of a self-contradiction. In his letter to Horace Greeley dated August 22, 1862, Lincoln writes: “...My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that...”
Lincoln continues with this non-sequitur, “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...”
According to many today, our Union is still in need of saving. In Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and so many of our cities, the freed have wrought within certain precincts of their own community a new kind of slavery; that of fear, poverty and dissolution of the soul.
In his famous 1858 debates, Lincoln repeatedly rejected the idea of permitting blacks to vote, serve as jurors, hold office or intermarry with whites. “There is a physical difference between the two,” he said on more than one occasion, “which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” Could he truly have believed this? I can only hope he was using it to win over some Southern support.
According to many ill-informed Northern leaders in Washington at that time, this war would be over in a matter of months, the emancipation of slaves completed, and the Confederate States back in the Union shortly thereafter. But the South wasn’t buying Lincoln’s dream, what the Confederacy lacked in numbers and industrial capacity, it more than made up for in courage. Because of Europe’s hunger for cotton, some in the “plantation states” expected France or England to come to their aid. But anti-slavery sentiment in Europe trumped even its love of cotton; Europe stayed out of it. Except for selling arms to both sides, of course. When it comes to arms dealing, principles are always the first casualties.
As we shall show, there were many Southern whites who despised the idea of slavery as much as anyone. Perhaps the North felt this group would be far less inclined to fight against the Union. Never-the-less the Confederate Army under command of General P.G.T. Beauregard delivered a stinging rebuke at Fort Sumpter. Lincoln and his supporters were shocked: the South and the Confederate flag would not be taken down so easily.
Committed now, and with continued support of the majority in Congress, Lincoln was forced to grow the Union army, adding to its original volunteer forces new draftees who would serve for “three years or the duration of the war.”
Some say the Union fought with one hand tied behind its back. If so, the tragedy is even worsened. Lincoln’s war – America’s most costly in our dearest blood – resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 620,000 and (recent studies suggest) 850,000 – mostly young white men on both sides. A total of 1,500,000 casualties! By comparison, WWII resulted in 405,000 American deaths. The nation was not prepared for slaughter of this magnitude. Families of the dead walked through the killing fields in an attempt to identify and bury their own. Many were left for nature to reclaim.
In the 1860 census, taken just before the War, there were about 3.9 million slaves in bondage in the United States, mostly in the southern States. This represented about 12% of the total population.
Not to put too fine a point on it, historically, there were many more whites brought to America as slaves than there ever were blacks! Historian Oscar Hardlin observes that in America, white “servants” were bartered for profit, sold to the highest bidder for the unpaid debts of their masters, and otherwise transferred like movable goods or chattels. In every civic, social and legal attribute, these victims were set apart. Despised. The condition of the first negroes in America must be viewed within the perspective of these conceptions and realities of white servitude.
Lincoln wrote that he was repulsed by the sight of black Africans, chained together, being transported by a boat he too was on, to plantations. Was Lincoln aware that white slaves were treated much worse? Or was his sympathy reserved, as it was with myopic European ladies, for black skin only. Dickens describes in Bleak House this brand of evangelical telescopic philanthropy in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, “a do‑gooder so absorbed in the welfare of the African natives of Borrioboola‑Gha that she fails to notice her own family sinking into ruin.” With white slaves dying in ditches, it was the worst sort of rose‑pink sentimentalism to worry oneself about West Indian Negroes.
In earlier years, white slaves drained the swamps, cleared the forests, built the roads. They worked and died in greater number than anyone else. During much of the Civil War, politicians and military leaders of the Confederacy could not travel in certain parts of the Deep South without armed escorts for fear of attack from “upcountry” Southern whites who hated the planter aristocracy and the war they saw as being for the sole benefit of the plantation owners. “Upcountry” Southern whites consisted in large part of survivors of white slavery, and their children, who had taken to the hills, mountains and Piedmont regions of the South, living in frontier conditions.
About this, scholars wrote that “In the antebellum 19th Century South, many white Southerners lived in the upcountry, an area of small farms and herdsmen engaged largely in subsistence agriculture. Little currency circulated, barter was common and upcountry families dressed in home‑spun cloth, the product of the spinning wheel and the hand‑loom.”
They were characterized thusly; “Humanity can scarce forbear to drop a tear on reflecting on the circumstances of many of them. With a poor wretched hut crowded with children, naked, hungry and miserable without bread or a penny of money to buy any, in short they appear as objects almost too contemptible to excite the public sympathy.”
Lincoln appears to have had little interest in these whites, and so they continued in poverty. White skin, apparently, excites little in the way of public sympathy even today.
Few groups emerge unstained by the debacle of slavery. According to the few rabbinical scholars with courage enough to search deep within the recesses of the Jewish historical record, there is irrefutable evidence that white slaves were brought to the Americas at a rate of about ten whites to one black. Jewish slave traders participated in every aspect of the international slave trade. One of the sources of the immense wealth of Jews was the subjugation of black Africans.
In the end, the price of Abraham Lincoln’s dream was 1.5 million casualties to free 3.9 million slaves, many of whom, as we shall show, were not terribly inclined to be “freed” in the first place. A nightmarish cost in human life – a terrible deal by any standard.
To make matters worse, plans to create new territories, or for the transport to places outside the States for this huge number of “instant freemen” quickly fell apart. Lincoln signed a contract with businessman Bernard Kock to establish a colony near Haiti. 453 freed slaves departed for the island. But a government investigation deemed Kock untrustworthy, and Secretary of State William Seward stopped the plan from going further. Poor planning, an outbreak of smallpox, and financial mismanagement by Kock left the colonists under-supplied and starving. Some moved to Haiti. The U.S. Navy arrived at the island to rescue survivors. Most freed slaves were left to fend for themselves in America, a nation completely upheavaled by the terrible War, which left scars and rifts between North and South, black and white; rifts which continue to this day.
Today, many African-Americans suffer the misconception that only white Americans held their ancestors in bondage. The 1860 census determined that even if all slave owners had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country holding slaves. 1.4 percent!
But all slave owners were not white. The reality is many black freemen were slave owners. Contrary to liberal opinion, the majority of these black slave masters were not “sub-contractors” of white masters or those who had purchased the freedom of their children, they were independent plantation owners. In fact, many free blacks in South Carolina owned as many as 30 or more slaves. In 1860, there were a good number of free blacks in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, was owned by an African-American widow and her son, who were owners of a large sugar cane plantation. Another black freeman who owned over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued (in 1860 dollars) at $264,000. In comparison, that year, the average wealth of a southern white man was $3,978. There are many more examples of black slave owners who were doing just fine in the years leading to the Civil War.
The argument today’s race hustlers put forth, that somehow all whites are responsible for the plight of African-Americans, is without merit and baseless. Lincoln spent the lives of at least 620,000 white men to free black slaves whose offspring to this very day largely remain, economically and spiritually in a poor state.
Consider that those white families who owned small numbers of slaves shared their meals and worked the fields side-by-side with them. They were more than just chattel before their emancipation. Afterward, whatever good intentions the North might have had faded in the light of its great debt; freed slaves were pretty much left to fend for themselves. The end result is what we have today, a nation with racial tension boiling just below the surface, with wounds reopened over and over by race-baiters who profit from the divide.
Had Lincoln been less ideologically driven, he could have crafted a far better deal. He certainly might have considered emancipation by attrition. The slave-holding States would have been allowed to keep whatever slaves they had, but not add any more. As a slave reached a certain age, he would be freed. Children of slaves would all be freemen, full citizens of the United States. Economic incentives could have been employed to add a bit of sugar to the medicine. Gradually, slave owners would become acclimated to the idea that new mechanical inventions replaced slaves. This, or other alternatives never considered, might have avoided the terrible spectacle of American killing American.
Consider the speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania, on March 4th of 1862. The subject up for debate was the pending Confiscation of Property of the Confederate Rebels (edited for brevity):
“We are standing now squarely face to face with questions of most pregnant significance,” began Cowan. “Shall we stand or fall by the Constitution, or shall we leave it and adventure ourselves upon the wide sea of revolution? Shall we attempt to liberate the slaves of the people of the rebellious states, or shall we leave them to regulate their domestic institutions the same as before the rebellion?
...This bill proposes, at a single stroke, to strip four million white people of all their property, real and personal, and mixed, of every kind whatsoever, and reduce them at once to absolute poverty...
Now, Sir, it does seem to me that if there was anything in the world calculated to make that four million people and their four hundred thousand soldiers in the field now and forever hostile to us and our Government, it would be the promulgation of a law such as this.
...This bill would liberate, perhaps, three millions of slaves; surely the most stupendous stroke for universal emancipation ever before attempted in the world.
Those who favor this bill seem determined to impose yet a greater project, of procuring a home for these emancipated millions in some tropical country, and of transporting, colonizing, and settling them there. Surely, sir... can we for a moment entertain this proposition seriously?
At a time... when we are in great debt, is it not strange that this scheme... should be so coolly presented... with a kind of surprise that anyone should oppose it?
The bill is in direct conflict with the Constitution... which guarantees the... property of the citizen...
Pass this bill, sir, and all that is left of the Constitution is not worth much...
...We have here in these Halls of Congress solemnly declared that the war was for no such purpose as conquest and subjugation; but that it was for the purpose of compelling obedience to the Constitution and the law. ...Is this law one of them?
...People have been duped into rebellion by being told that we of the North were all abolitionists, intent... on the emancipation of their slaves, and the destruction of their social system. That slander, sir, was the moving cause of the war.
...We have said we had no right, and we claimed none, to meddle with slaves or slavery in the slave States.
...I know that many people suppose that our powers under the Constitution have been indefinitely enlarged by the fact that a civil war is now raging, calling into play what is called the ‘war power’ of Congress, by virtue of which we can pass any law we choose which tends or is supposed to tend toward the suppression of the rebellion, and that under it this Bill is warranted by the Constitution.
I think all this will be found a delusion and a snare... Nobody pretends that if Jefferson Davis alone had been guilty of treason... and had escaped the jurisdiction of the courts, that Congress could have attained him as a traitor, or forfeited his property, or emancipated his slaves. Even the simplest man would have known that in such case he must be tried, convicted, and punished by law. Nor can the case be altered if one hundred thousand other traitors were in the same category. The grants of power to us in the Constitution were fixed in it from the beginning.
...But the case has arisen where the laws are inadequate to the preservation of the order of society, and the question is, what remedy? ...Since the law is of no avail it resorts to...war, and those who resist are treated as enemies.
...The Constitution declares that the President shall be the Commander-in-Chief, or, in other words, the force of the nation is put into his hands ...In this case the President has the right to take, by way of capture, all the public property of the rebels used in the war, such as forts, ships, ammunition, stores of every kind, but he could not do as this bill proposes to do; he could not follow the rebel after his surrender and take from his house the private property which he had left there for his wife and children while he was at war. And all this because a Christian civilization has taught the nations that such mode of making war is mischievous and injurious. The modern rule of the law of nations is plainly understood by all: ‘Private property on land is exempt from confiscation, with the exception when taken from enemies in the field or besieged towns, and of military contributions levied upon the inhabitants of hostile territory.
...Several millions of negros are now in bondage. Where are the signs of their [demanding] emancipation? Have not hundreds of thousands of these had ample opportunity to throw off their chains within the last few months? Have they done so? [No!] And if they have not done so, can you compel them to exchange voluntary servitude for involuntary freedom? I thought the world was old enough for everyone to know, if you want freedom, you must strike the blow which is to secure it.”
The good Senator was right. The economic cost of freeing the slaves by other means would have been far less than the cost of the War, which, by the time it was over, broke the backs of Federal, State and municipal budgets across the country, forcing the institution of an annual income tax of “3% of personal earnings over $800.”
Historians create mythical heroes. Lincoln’s grand monument stands as a symbol for all who demand freedom for all, regardless of the color of their skin. I do not debate this end. There is no compromise here. Men must be free. But I despise Lincoln’s terrible means and its cost in blood and lasting hate. Having spent the lives of at least 620,000 white men, far too many of the generations of those they fought so gallantly to free remain now in self-imposed psychological bondage.
