Newly listed by our sponsor - "Lincoln's Gamble", by Todd Brewster - the truth behind the Emancipation Proclamation

On New Year's Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln (with William H. Seward, his Secretary of State) signed the Emancipation Proclamation, earning himself the soubriquet "The Great Emancipator", because he freed the slaves. 

So goes the hagiography. The truth is that the Proclamation didn't go nearly that far. It broadened the goals of the Union war effort. It made the eradication of slavery into an explicit Union goal, to be achieved not on that day but after the conclusion of hostilies. 

President Lincoln justified the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure intended to cripple the Confederacy and reunite the United States of America. Being mindful of possible challenges on the constitutionality of the Proclamation, the President applied it only to the Confederate states then in rebellion. 

Why President Lincoln issued the Proclamation, at the time he did, is the subject of Lincoln's Gamble, by Todd Brewster (Simon & Schuster, 2014), now available by mail from our dear sponsor's e-store, used, in very fine condition, at a great price.

Mr Brewster is a certified liberal journalist, having written for HuffPost and the NYT. But, as a professor of oral history at West Point, he has to admit that President Lincoln's motives were not altogether altruistic. Although he was no racist, he was a man of his times, recognizing the now politically unrecognizable, i.e. that there is a difference between the races. 

He thought it unlikely that the two races could live together in a harmonious society, and was an advocate, even as he signed the document, for the establishment of a black colony, in central America or Africa, to which freed blacks could be sent... if they wished, of course.

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration as a matter of military necessity. On New Year's Day of 1863, the Union was losing the war, and the tide of public opinion in the North was running against the President. He could think of no alternative but to roll the dice -- Mr Brewster's words -- and hope the freeing of the slaves (sort of) would bring would bring victory in its wake.

President Lincoln lived long enough to see the victory he hoped for, but not long enough to see the realization of his fears for the aftermath. This book will give you some food for thought, and fuel for debates with your friends, both liberal and conservative. If you buy it, tell `em Walt sent ya! 

Remembering Abraham Lincoln

February 12th used to be celebrated as Lincoln's Birthday. Which it was. February 12, 1809 was the date. Because it's Black History Month, the only holiday Americans get now is Martin Luther King Day. Washington, Lincoln and other nobodies have to make do with "Presidents Day". That's one of the fruits of the triumph of freedom and equality begun by President Lincoln and completed by... wait for it... President LBJ.

Since President Lincoln and others are gradually being consigned to the Memory Hole, I thought it might be appropriate to share a few opinions of Honest Abe, as penned by his contemporaries, drawn from Civil War Curiosities, by Webb Garrison (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, 1994).

No other war maker was so widely vilified as was Abraham Lincoln. Contemptuous of the president's announced policies, the abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade announced that Lincoln's views on slaver "could only come of one who was born of 'poor white trash' and educated in a slave State." Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had his own eyes on the White House, characterized his leader as "greatly wanting in will and decision, in comprehensiveness, in self-reliance, and clear, well-definted purpose."

Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's most famous clergyman in 1861, denounced the president from the pulpit. According to Beecher, the chief executive lacked any spark of genius and possessed "not an element of leadership, not one particle of heroic enthusiasm." Fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips described Lincoln as "a second-rate man" and charged his "slackness" with "doing more than the malice of Confederates to break up the Union."

Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, who was among the first to commit himself fully to the war effort, castigated the man for whom he raised regiments of volunteers. "Besides doing my proper work," wrote Andrews, "I amsadly but firmly tr5ying to help organize some movement, if possible to save the President from the infamy of ruining his country."

Soon the Massachusetts leader sent one of his top aides to confer with Lincoln. Reporting about this visit, Henry Lee said just what Andrew wanted to hear. As he sat waiting, Lee recalled, "I grew more and more cross to think that this Western mummy of a rail splitter should sit in Washington's chair."

Congressman Frank Blair of Missouri urged that the primary obligation of every Unionist was "to stop fighting Jeff Davis and turn in on our own Government and make something of it," According to the lawmaker, soon to become a Federal brigadier, all Confederate leaders taken together had not harmed the4 nation has as much as "the cowardice, ignorance, and stupidity of Lincoln's administration."

I'll leave for another day the quotation of President Lincoln's thoughts about "African-Americans" (as they are now called) and their place in American society. Suffice it to say that General Robert E. Lee's views, quoted in Walt's profile, were much the same as those of the Great Emancipator. And we know that they were both wrong, as evidenced by the contribution of people of colour to making America what it is today. Right?

DON'T tear down this flag!

Walt is incensed -- putting it mildly -- by the increasingly strident demands of the usual suspects (including Mitt Romney and a starlet posing as Governor of South Carolina) to remove the Confederate battle flag from its position next to the SC state capitol. Their argument is that since the "Southern Cross" (as it is sometimes known) has been appropriated by some racists and social misfits, including the nutbar who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston last week, the flag which the South has loved for a century and a half is no longer worthy of respect. They are wrong.

The Confederate battle flag was not intended to stand for racial supremacy, let alone slavery. THIS is what it stands for.

For over 150 years, the Confederate battle flag has been displayed throughout the Old South (and all over America) to honour the 260,000 Southerners who died in the War of the Secession fighting for the Cause in which they believed. That cause was not slavery, but the right of the people of the sovereign states to decide for themselves what form of society they wished to live in, and what form of government they wished to have.

Slavery only became an issue when Abraham Lincoln made it so, in his Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863. He did this for political reasons, not because he was a believer in the equality of the races. Here, from "Abraham Lincoln Never Believed in Racial Equality", is a direct quote from a speech by "the Great Emancipator" at Springfield IL in 1858:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality ... I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negros and white men.

But the civil war -- regarded by blacks as a white man's war -- was going badly. In the North, anti-war sentiment was growing, enlistments were declining, and morale was bad. However, there was a strong abolitionist faction in Congress and in the upper strata of Northern society, and Lincoln felt that making the conflict about slavery, rather than about states' rights, would get the "progressive thinkers" more engaged. So, "Free the slaves!" became the new war cry -- "the battle cry of freedom".

And so it was that the Stars and Stripes was made to represent "freedom" and the Confederate flag slavery, a mischaracterization which is being revived in the heat of overreaction to the Charleston shootings. The deranged kid had a Confederate flag sewed to his backpack. So what? Many of the cops, white and black, who shoot innocent people, black and white, have the Star-spangled Banner sewed onto their uniforms. Does that make them evil racists or advocates of a return to slavery? [Well? Does it? Ed.]

And how about the Sandy Hook massacre? The Stars and Stripes was flying outside Sandy Hook Elementary School on the day Adam Lanza shot 26 adults and children. The same flag was flying -- and still flies -- at the CT state capitol in New Haven. Does anyone seriously suggest it was the sight of that flag that fuelled the killer's depravity? Ridiculous?! Certainly. Just as ridiculous as the notion that banning the display of the Confederate flag will somehow end race hatred in America.

Footnote and recommendation: For an even-handed commentary on the reasons for the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Walt can think of no better reference than Ken Burns's superb TV mini-series, The Civil War, available as a boxed set  from Amazon and other sources.