I think your being FAR, FAR too harsh on President Lincoln! As Otto von Bismarck observed, "Politics is the art of the possible." Meaning ~ it's not about what is right or good, but what can ACTUALLY be done. Lincoln was an elected President; not an absolute ruler.
And, even then, the track record of European leaders attempting to be absolute rulers is hardly encouraging.
When Charles I of England tried to impose his will on the British Parliament he ended up provoking the English Civil War and losing his head (in a public execution).
The Russian Czars were assassinated as a matter of course.

As for Lincoln......reaching his goals in "Preserving the Union," in time of war, was as frustrating as herding cats. Of course he had to wheel and deal and make promises he knew he couldn't keep. One day when somebody saw Lincoln looking worried and asked, "what's wrong?" Lincoln replied, "There's too many piglets for the teats."

 

The fact that most of the so called "Founding Fathers" owned slaves should be pointed out whenever reactionaries claim for them eternal insight into the Absolute Truth.

I suspect that more than a few of these "Founding Fathers" were the fathers of slaves whose slave mothers had been forced to have sex with them.

Nevertheless, owning slaves was not treason. Secession was.

Do I think less of Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves?

Not really. At least he felt guilty about it. If I was a slave I would rather be owned by a man who felt guilty about his ownership of me, than a man who thought he was doing me some kind of a favor, and who fought the United States to preserve my slavery.

Back in the day I read two anthologies of Jefferson's writing. Most of Jefferson's writings consists of letters written to various people on various subjects. Jefferson was very well read in several languages including Latin, and perhaps Greek.

 

What you were taught, and what the 'black commuity' were expected to beleive ...might be 2 different issues.

Dont think for one thin second that ''slaves'' were not taken by gun point in that era.

The life of a slave had no value if the 'slave' rejected the notion of becoming a slave.

 

Harsh?....nah, emotional rhetoric is and has always been successful throughout history, in reaching ones political goals.

The attempts at abolishing history within the U.S. is older than Lincoln himself, the original drafts of the U.S.C., confirms such.

Lincoln really didn't succeed in his attempts to abolish Slavery..did he?, slavery still flourished within the borders of the U.S., it took another 100 years for the abolishment of slavery really succeeded.

 

Lincoln was hardly alone when it comes to the manufacturing of ethical excuses for war .

Lincoln changed the civil war into a perceived war of slavery versus anti-slavery .

Woodrow Wilson changed world war 1 into a war to make the world safe for democracy while essentially denying it in the United States. And he never had any use for blacks in the United States before or after the war .

Lyndon Baines Johnson manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin event.

George W. Bush largely invented the weapons of mass destruction deception .

Seems like every war has had this false ethical component.

My problem with Lincoln is not just that he was a hypocrite on the issue of slavery but he also abolished the writ of habeas corpus. He also wrote a letter to a motherhood lost all five of her children in the Civil War . The mother having received the letter tore it into pieces yet it mysteriously wound up in the newspapers and the reason it wound up in the newspapers is because Lincoln had it delivered to the newspapers with no mention of the mothers complete disregard for it which Lincoln knew about .

I just think that he was a political opportunist .

I don't think that if I were living at the time that I would've taken joy in Lincoln's assassination but I don't think that I would've bothered me a whole lot either .

 

Two points of interest: The U.S.S.Maddox came into Port Adelaide (S.A.) after it was allegedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin and I asked her crew about it. They all looked sheepish and only said not to believe everything I saw in the newspapers.
The letter you mention is quoted in the film Saving Private Ryan as the excuse to remove James Ryan from combat after the death of his three brothers.

 

And the raping of the South continues.

 

Just for the record So here w go. On May 23 1958 Congress passed a act. That made ALL Confederate soldiers sailors and marines equal veterans . With the same rights as all other veterans of the United States of America Thus if you are taking down or removing a statue monument or flag from the civil war. Then it is considered a act against a veteran of the United States of America. This is not fake crap I made up you can check it out for your self before you reply.

 

I do not care about that law. I am confident that it said nothing about the removal of Confederate statues.

 

You mentioned Confederate 3 times and statues twice in your vey short post That I was replying too

 

Ulysses Grant was a veteran of the civil war, so they should remove all of his status and rename all buildings and parks named after him too. Let's just bury the whole civil war. We don't want anyone to be offended.

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana

 

You Americans had all of this "civil rights" business for about 10 years in the 1950s-60s with some idea that the socio-political pendulum had swung to the extreme right during Reconstruction (1965-1877) and that Martin Luther King and the "freedom riders" and folk singers would bring it to a central balance.Well, of course that hasn't happened; what has happened is the pendulum has kept on swinging to the far left. And now it is the activist Negroes and the white leftists who are controlling the debate; it is they who want to eradicate all trace of Confederate history and a Southern sense of identity.

And I'm really bored with this leftist bullshit guilt trip about "slavery." By the way, the media is completely silent about the pointed murder of white people in South Africa now that that prick Mandela is gone. The blacks have an agenda to murder all whites by 2030, I read. & check "social media" to see Oprah Winfrey on record saying all white people over a certain age (us Baby Boomers) should be killed...and a woman reported hearing Winfrey also saying this on South African radio.

 

There is so much bullshit in this post I don't know where to start so im going to simply point out that 1965 came after 1877

 

Are you so stupid you don't even understand what happened in the Southern American states after the Civil War; about the South being forcibly integrated by the occupying Union Army and the establishment of Jim Crow as a reaction to that "Yankee" intervention in the wake of the gradual withdrawal of the army by 1877? AND check social media for Winfrey's comments.

 

I think its funny thats you criticize the left for felling guilty about slavery while you are still but hurt about the civil war. And what the fuck does Oprah have to do with the price of tea in China?

 

Why are Southern whites nostalgic about a war they fought to break up the United States and preserve slavery, and a war that they lost?

Any German who is nostalgic for the Third Reich is justifiably viewed as a pariah. It is time to view Southern whites who are nostalgic for the Confederacy the way way.

The Confederates suffered total, humiliating, and well deserved defeat. The good guys won.

 

The Atlantic June 4, 2017

"The Myth of the Kindly General Lee"
The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

[Robert E.] Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”...

When two of his slaves escaped, and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”...

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property...

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”...

Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well. According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black schools...

As one Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statue to Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’”

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans.

 

It would have been a long time before the Confederates freed the slaves, after fighting a civil war to keep them in slavery.

 

EVERYBODY kept slaves in the US, by "everybody" I mean even people YOU wouldn't think of....The prosperous Indians owned slaves and even freed blacks owned slaves. Slavery was simply part of the economy, revisionist history is pointless.
Oprah has everything to do with the "price of tea in China;" when it comes to her expressing a genocide of white people My "price of tea in China" reference to Winfrey is that Blacks are just as capable of being "racist and urging violence" as you accuse us Anglo-Saxons of being......
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I'm quite happy for the Left to feel guilty (about anything)

 

The American Civil War was not only about slavery, but what Southern states felt to be an overreach of the Federal government into individual state rights. Slavery was also a big part of the war, but not the only factor. The demolition of Confederate reminders denied future generations the right to know our history. By attempting to eradicate the past, we are condemning ourselves to repeat it.