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| Abraham Lincoln (Photo credit: paukrus) |
Victor Volsky penned an excellent piece on Abraham Lincoln over at
American Thinker. Here are a few excerpts.
On
September 22, 1862, President Lincoln published the Emancipation
Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves would be
set free...in the 10 states of the Confederation which were "in
rebellion against the United States." The slaves in the states that,
willingly or unwillingly, were not part of the Confederacy, such as
Kentucky, Maryland, or Delaware, were to remain in chains. The
hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation was so blatant that even
Lincoln's loyal secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically
observed, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves
where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set
them free."
Moreover,
if, according to the progressive version of history, abolition of
slavery was the cause of the Civil War, why didn't Lincoln free the
slaves right off the bat? Why did he wait for many months -- and do it
only when the war took a bad turn for the Union, and, more important,
when the superpowers of the day, Great Britain and France, were about to
recognize the Confederacy and come to its aid? Viewed realistically,
abolition of slavery was by any measure a stratagem in pursuit of a
purely pragmatic goal: to win over British and French public opinion and
scare away the Confederacy's potential allies, whose assistance might
have had a crucial effect on the outcome of the war. It was a brilliant
and highly successful tactical move.
As
a matter of fact, the president never tried to hide his real objective.
He wrote: "I view the matter [Emancipation Proclamation] as a
practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or
disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." And
here is another confession of the Great Emancipator: "I will also
concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them
that we are incited by something more than ambition." Lincoln had every
reason to fret over the Europeans' suspicions of his intentions. The
Old World largely (ironically, with the exception of that bastion of
reaction, Russia) sided with the Confederacy, which was viewed as a
victim of a predatory North driven by greed.
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