Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Great Emancipator

What people really thought of Lincoln:

"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." - Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward
and:
"The principle (of the Proclamation) is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." - The London Spectator
You see, even in Lincoln's day they had spin doctors advising the President. The above quotes are from a column by Walter Williams who likes this book on the Lincoln Presidency: The Real Lincoln.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

2 comments:

RavingDave said...

I find history fascinating. All sorts of things come to light if you dig enough. I was familiar with the first quote, I didn't know about the second. Not that it matters now, but from my reading, it looks like the Civil war had more to do with Ego's than anything else.

David

Anonymous said...

egos drive history. history is people making descisions. so by nature is not disconected from humanity. but the civil war mostly ego driven? I would say it was driven by two culturaly oposite existential imperiatives. the south believed thier way of life and self determination as individual states was in jepeordy and the north beleived the continuance of, and spread of slavery would eventually poison america as a nation, there was going to be no peaceful solution to the problem it was going to take the spilling of blood to clean the conscience of america and decide the matter with finality.