Freedom Gave Us Victory: The Mind of Abraham Lincoln
Oh, what a better and stronger nation might have been, if only Lincoln could have lived a few more years.
Days ago the world was witness to the shameful inadequacy of the men who have occupied the Oval Office and may occupy it again.
The debate between incumbent President Joe Biden and once-and-future (Please God protect us all!) President Donald Trump was such a disastrous exposure of Joe’s mental decay that even the New York Times and the UK’s The Economist are saying that Joe should step down. I tried listening to some of Joe’s rambling, wild-eyed slurring. It was pitiful even to me, and I hate the man.
The Speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that Joe Biden should be "removed as president". Robert Kennedy Jr is running third as a candidate for president. Maybe that's why an old history buff like me gets a familiar tingle from that phrase.
Bobby Kennedy's uncle was "removed as president" and his father was "removed" as a presidential candidate well on his way to defeating Nixon.
Just how do Washington's politicians plan to "remove" Joe as president? Another slow-mo motorcade in Dealey Plaza? Another lone nut gunman totally unconnected – seriously, believe me, scout’s honour – unrelated in any way to back-room political necessities and CIA fixers?
How many US presidents have been "removed" by yet another totally unconnected and unmotivated lone nut gunman?
Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy. So far. Unsuccessful attempts by lone and not- so-lone poorly motivated gunmen to shoot the president were survived by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jerry Ford and Ronald Reagan.
The first victim, Abraham Lincoln, was standing in the way of the radical Republicans' desire to militarily occupy the defeated South. James Garfield was a reformer but his VP Chester Arthur was a compliant tool of the New York City mob. William McKinley was as mentally and physically shaky as Joe Biden is today but his VP, Teddy Roosevelt, was fully ready to carry a big stick to expand the American empire. John F. Kennedy was standing in the way of the war in Vietnam and had vowed to destroy the CIA.
In all four of these "removals" of a president, the lone and crazy murderers whom official American history summarily convicted as the killers of these presidents had no credible rational motivation whatsoever.
A new and improved President Remover seems to be re-issued every generation since the first Removal, that of President Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of those great American traditions, or so it seems.
But American traditions are sadly neglected these days. Hanging Witches. Santa Claus. Thanksgiving. Shooting the president. Is nothing sacred anymore?
Come back with me now to the spring of 1865. Out of the agony of a Civil War bloodier than had ever yet been imagined, the tender sprout of a new age of freedom seemed just about to flower.
Come back and see what genius once occupied the Office of the Presidency. At a time when the very existence of the nation was in deadly doubt fate made a great man President of the United States. Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in the USA by leading a bloody revolution that gave America a second birth.
Yesterday, in searching for a particular quote I remembered from Abraham Lincoln, I discovered that it came from an interview he gave to a journalist in 1865. Ever since I read about Lincoln and the Civil war when I was barely a teen I have admired Lincoln. Finding this larger example of his brilliance I admire him all the more.
President Abraham Lincoln gave an interview in the closing weeks of the Civil War while the debate was raging in Congress between the radical Republicans on one side and on the other side the War Democrats. This interview seems to me to encapsulate the thinking of Abraham Lincoln as, in the final months of his life, he struggled to ensure the passage of the 14th Amendment which abolished American slavery forever.
The Radical Republicans were a coalition between the abolitionists, in whose mind the war had been fought to free the slaves, and their wealthy industrial backers of the burgeoning mid-West railroad magnates who wished to conquer the South, occupy it with troops and exploit it and parcel it out as the spoils of conquest until the whole area were exhausted and the original states replaced by military districts.
After Lincoln was removed by assassination this policy became that of the Andrew Johnson administration [1865 to 1869] and the Ulysses Grant administration [1869 to 1873] that followed it. This was the era called “Reconstruction” which did so much to perpetuate and deepen the bitterness of the white South and delay the healing, liberation and reconciliation of the nation for a century. The exacerbation of black-white and north-south division may yet destroy the Union of the United States as a nation. The divisions are starkly displayed on the red versus blue electoral maps of 2024.
Lincoln stood as an obstruction to this policy. He proposed to return the States of the former Confederacy to the Union as they were before the war but with slavery abolished and the former black slaves accepted as equal voting citizens. The thing that had to be done before that could be realized was to amend the Constitution to turn the former slaves from property into equal citizens at long last. This constitutional amendment could only be done by Congress, and it would have to be the Congress that did not include Southern Democrats.
On the other side against Lincoln and the Republicans were the War Democrats. These were senators and representatives of the United States (not the Confederate States), including from the ”border states”, slave-holding states which had not seceded but had sent troops to fight for the Union. The War Democrats had not followed the majority of Democrats out of Washington in 1861 to pledge loyalty to the Confederate States. They had fought for the Union but they had no intention to back the acceptance of black people as equal citizens.
We people of today don’t and can’t realize – and I include the average registered Democrat – that the deepest heart of the Democratic Party was that it was the party of the Anti-Bellum, “King Cotton” South and then of the rebellious Confederacy and then it was the “Dixicrat” party of the post-Reconstruction “Jim Crow” South. Despite Franklin Roosevelt successfully rebranding the Democratic Party as labourite-left, in its collective soul, under a self-deluding facade of socialist liberalism, the Democratic Party has never abandoned the attitudes that were born during the era of slavery.
This is why Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, one hundred years after Lincoln was murdered, can justly be called the foundation of the “Welfare Plantation”. It was designed to be the re-institution of the dependency of black people on the State – really it was servitude under a new guise of social welfare liberalism. Lyndon Johnson said that with the institution of his new social welfare programs for black people, “We’ll have these niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” More significant and yet more terrible words have seldom been uttered by a President of the United States.
In 1960 the black workers of Detroit, along with their white co-workers, enjoyed the highest per capita income in the USA. The rate of single unwed mothers in the black community was about 25% – and this was recognized as a worrisome problem – whereas it was almost negligible among white women. Today that rate is 75% (and single white mothers raising children on Welfare is also a growing trend) and all of these devastated households are supported by government handouts. Black aspiration is dead. Crime runs rampant in the US major cities dominated by generations of Democrat political machines. The “liberal” policies of defunding the police have aided in turning these cities into savage, lawless slums. A new Civil War seems as immanent as does the decline and death of America.
Turning back to 1865, there were politicians and industrial backers almost forgotten today who saw clearly a terrible problem. They saw that the question of the abolition of black slavery was in fact the easy part. Behind that was the much deeper question of black equality.
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a best seller in 1835 and as influential in subsequent events as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had darkly prophesied that the legacy of slavery would forever divide the black people of America from the whites who would never accept them as equals. Among the most far-seeing of the War Democrats, and the New York and New England commercial elites and the Republican industrial magnates alike, there was a conviction that to really re-unite the nation, the racial divisions must be respected and perpetuated come what may. Military occupation and reduction of the South would be essential, but compromise will and must follow. Ten years later “Reconstruction” had come to an end and systemic, legal “Jim Crow” segregation was truly instituted. That era saw the absolute lock of the Democratic Party on the Southern States and in Washington they were called the “Dixicrats”.
On April 15, 1865, the day it was announced that Abraham Lincoln was dead, one of the most prominent US Senators who held sway in the middle ground between the militant Republicans and war Democrats said that God had mercifully preserved the life of President Lincoln “as long as he was needed.” When I wonder why and how and by whom Lincoln was removed, that sentence rings dark and deep.
Here follows my excerpt from the interview Lincoln gave in early 1865 when it had become apparent that the armies of the Confederacy were almost ready to collapse. We need to bear in mind that in the background of these remarks is the knowledge Lincoln had that the final push against the Confederacy had been possible only because up to some 200,000 black men had fought for the Union; most of them were slaves freed by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. In 1863 the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of black Union soldiers under the leadership of young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, displayed so much bravery and skill by leading the assault on Battery Wagner (and suffering 50% casualties including Shaw who still lies with his men) that some 200,000 black men volunteered and fought with the Union army.
Thus, said Lincoln, “Freedom gave us … 200,000 men. It will give us more yet.”
Abraham Lincoln:
"[If the war Democrats have their way] These men [the over 180,000 black men who had fought for the Union] will be disbanded, returned to slavery & we will have to fight two nations instead of one. I have tried it.
"You cannot conciliate the South, when the mastery and control of millions of blacks makes them sure of ultimate success. You cannot conciliate the South, when you place yourself in such a position, that they see they can achieve their independence.
"The war democrat depends upon conciliation. [If determined to fight against the Confederacy without freeing and enlisting the slaves] He must confine himself to that policy entirely. If he fights at all in such a war as this he must economize life & use all the means which God & nature puts in his power. Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.
"We have to hold territory. Where are the war democrats to do it? The field was open to them to have enlisted & put down this rebellion by force of arms, by conciliation, long before the present policy [that of enlisting black men into the army] was inaugurated.
"There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.
“My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition.
“It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union.
“But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from the strength of our enemies, & instead of alienating the south from us, there are evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our own & rebel soldiers. My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it… “
I feel that it should be noted that Lincoln referred to those who thought the war had been fought for abolition alone as his “enemies”. Obviously these were the most militant and radical wing of the Republicans, his Party. But to him they were not associates nor even political adversaries but “enemies”. In war time that’s a very uncompromising word. It means a fight to the death of one or the other.
Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865. He spoke of "malice toward none … charity for all…” When he was done he stepped down among the crowd and approached Frederick Douglass, the great black leader, and asked Douglass what he thought of the speech. Douglass said he felt unqualified to give an opinion. Lincoln said, “Oh but it is your opinion that I most want to hear.”
Oh, what a moment was there! Oh, what a better and stronger nation might have been, if only Lincoln could have lived a few more years. In the background of the photograph taken of Lincoln giving his Inaugural speech the figure of John Wilkes Booth can be identified.
The interviewer later wrote:
“The President appeared to be not the pleasant joker I had expected to see, but a man of deep convictions & an unutterable yearning for the success of the Union cause. His voice was pleasant---his manner earnest & cordial. As I heard a vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his mind grew in stature like his body, & that I stood in the presence of the great guiding intellect of the age, & that those huge Atlantian shoulders were fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies. His transparent honesty, his republican simplicity, his gushing sympathy for those who offered their lives for their country, his utter forgetfulness of self in his concern for his country, could not but inspire me with confidence, that he was Heaven’s instrument to conduct his people thro this red sea of blood to a Canaan of peace & freedom. Commander Dole then came in... "
And history moved on.
I made a rather serious mistake. My old English Lit teacher would call it a "howler".
Lincoln said, "My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition."
I assumed he meant that the strict abolitionists were his enemies. But re-reading it I can see he was saying that those who were opposed to abolition were his enemies. That would be those who wanted to "conciliate" the south by returning the blacks to slavery. Lincoln was saying that if they were allowed to prevail in Congress the black men who had risked and lost so much to fight for freedom would be returned to slavery. And if that happened the Union would earn the enmity of not only the white south but all the blacks who had been promised freedom and fought for it only to be betrayed. These former slaves had fought in the blue uniform, thousands had given their lives, and now they held territory that there were not enough white soldiers to keep. So Lincoln had come to realize that only through freedom, through giving freedom to the slaves, could this war be won and finished. On consideration, I can see that Lincoln was making enemies of those who thought he was doing too much too fast by making his "new birth of freedom" – yes, that was his vision even at Gettysburg on November 9, 1863 – and at the same time he was making enemies of those who wanted not peace but revenge. He had talked of "malice toward none, charity for all". Did he mean charity for the rebels, leniency for the traitors? Lincoln was walking a tightrope between radicals on both sides. No wonder he had his infamous dream of being hurried through darkness and storm to some ominous and hidden future and then seeing his own dead body lying in state.