How does siding with one or the other of lumpers and splitters turn into a charge of Political Correctness? (Or is it true that “PC” has no meaning beyond “stuff I wish other people wouldn’t say”?)
Just curious.
If you read the post “for various POLITICAL reasons…” :rolleyes: It is more than the battle between “lumpers & spliters”, this re-naming has political over tones.
That remark (like Lincoln’s attitudes toward Negroes generally) has to be considered in its context. In addition to his “House Divided” speech already mentioned, there’s the reality that in 1860, he ran on a platform of permanently confining slavery to the 15 existing slave states, and was unwilling to bend on that pledge in order to save the Union, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t back down on that pledge as Southern secession went from threat to reality.
So Lincoln would have been willing to save the Union without freeing a single slave, as long as slavery’s expansion to new territories was ended. That’s the key qualifier here.
Minor factual nitpick: there were four slave states in the Union - Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.
At the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln did not have the authority to end slavery in these states, because they were still in the Union. People seem to forget this.
I’m a big fan of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, on account of Henry Mayer’s excellent bio, All On Fire. Garrison did a lot to move Northern public opinion to the point where Lincoln could take the stands he did, and get elected.
But Lincoln was still the guy who made it happen. And until he did, it was hardly inevitable that American slavery would end in the nineteenth century. So IMHO, he deserves the credit.
I think your claim that Lincoln freed the slaves “for power-hungry reasons” needs to be backed up. And sure, keeping England from recognizing the Confederacy was part of the calculus behind the Emancipation Proclamation, but is there any doubt that Lincoln was already antislavery?
I would highly recommend that you read All On Fire, which puts paid to all of that bushwa. Garrison and his followers largely regarded blacks as fellow human beings, not as some lesser breed, and were unquestionably motivated by the plight of American blacks themselves. Many of them were demonstrably ready to live side-by-side with blacks.
That is not to say that there wasn’t a goodly chunk of the Northern populace who were against slavery because they resented what they perceived as the institution’s damaging effect on the price of labor. But they weren’t really part of any movement (and the abolitionist movement was unquestionably an organized movement); they were just voters who disliked slavery.
That explains it then. I have a few friends that went to high school there, and they told me (with pride) that the entire history department had been liberals for the last 20 years or so. Unsurprisingly, they’re all liberals too. What I should have said, but didn’t, was that it’s not a point of pride to have gotten a view of history with only one slant.
"We’ll take the niggers and the chinks, but we don’t want the Irish!
“Un-un, baby! Its everybody or no deal.”
“Aw, hell! Everybody then!”
Something about this thread made me think of this scene for some reason.
I didn’t call Lincoln vehemently anything, as I don’t consider him a founding father. For instance, Jefferson’s racism wasn’t just simple prejudice. He often justified his racist beliefs with pseudoscience (but whether or not it was junk science “for that time”, I don’t know). He vehemently supported the idea of negro inferiority and concocoted asshat justifications for their enslavement. He denigrated the accomplishments of exceptional blacks because they challenged his racist views. Jefferson was a fantastic politician, but as a person he was a creep. And the enormous number of slaves this Father of Freedom owned takes away some of his “greatness”, IMHO. His being a Founding Father does not mean I have to kiss his ass. If this makes me stupid, I guess that’s what I am.
As for other founding fathers in other places, I don’t know.
I’m not a historian or any other humanity academic, but my understanding is that “racism” is a stand-alone term. I’m racist if I think my ethnic group is superior to other ethnic groups. This holds for now or if I’m standing on Europa a million years from now. If everyone was “racist” then everyone was "racist. Period.
I don’t think Lincoln was more or less racist than most other Americans at that time, and I don’t think this makes him a great anything. His emancipation of the slaves had nil to do with a lack of racial hostility. Like Jefferson, he was a great politician. But this does not necessarily make for a great man.
I don’t know why you’re addressing this to me. I thought I made it clear that I understood that you should reserve judgement for people “within your time”. I just have a hard time figuring out how one chooses to delineate “times”.
MSU 1978 addressed the question I had:
That’s fine and all, but aren’t you judging people by all these expected’s and should’s? Like, why should someone of 1850 be expected to support abolition? Were most people against slavery in 1850?
Were most people anti-semitic during the 1940s? If so, does this explain/excuse the Holocaust? This is an extreme analogy, but for some slavery is seen as a centuries-old tragedy along the same lines as the Holocaust. It explains why the simple “it was the times” excuse is often seen as a lame cop-out. Sometimes shit is shit no matter what your time frame. But I understand that we must understand the ambient feelings of a population to judge the extremes of individuals.
Lincoln was racist, just like the rest of American society back then. When young people first learn this, it can lead to hurt feelings and disillusionment (as it had once done to me… as you may have noticed, I have a hard time writing “our founding fathers”). I’m not saying the young woman is right to denounce Lincoln. I’m saying her reaction is natural and not unusual in someone so young and naive.
Something being understandable doesn’t make something right.
It’s understandable that the killers in Columbine were driven to such extremes.
Doesn’t make it right, does it?
Sure, bitch.
I’m pretty sure I said it wasn’t right.
Perhaps I should say " it’s understandable to ME" because I shared the same feelings when I was 17. I don’t know. I’m just offering a different opinion besides “She’s so stupid and has been brainwashed by liberals”.
Well, that I can agree with.
Perhaps I just get jumpy over this because I’m a historian.
This is an excellent discussion, it really deserves to be in the GD and not the Pit.
I wouldn’t say MOST people were against slavery in the 1850s, but certainly in the North it was beginning to fall out of favor. Connecticut was the first state to outlaw slavery in 1850. This was after slave importation was banned in 1808 and after the English banned slavery in 1838. Clearly by 1850, if you were a progressive thinker, you would have had knowledge that slavery was wrong. That’s my yardstick: when would a reasonably progressive and open minded person first start to see that something was wrong? I would draw a parallel to smoking- in the 1940s, who knew that it was bad for your health? I’d give people who started smoking in the 1940s the benefit of the doubt for having started smoking, but I wouldn’t extend that same courtesy to someone who first lit up in 1990.
Regarding the Founding Fathers- We’ll probably have to agree to disagree about Jefferson. Can you define “enormous number of slaves” for us?
It’s not just high-school children who are idiots. I had someone recently insist to me – this was a person with a BA and MBA – that Lincoln was one of the largest slaveowners in the South. I said I thought Illinois was a free state, and not in the South, and anyway, Lincoln was poor and I was pretty sure he couldn’t even have afforded a part-time, bring-your-own-lunch slave, but he said I was wrong – that “everyone” knew Lincoln had hundreds of slaves. Or maybe this guy thought they were working at the White House.
I think he was confusing Lincoln with Thomas Jefferson. Well, they are both male. Sigh.
Owning one slave was one too many, but Jefferson owned close to 200. Maybe not enormous for a regular rich dude back in the day, but it was enormous for a guy frequently lauded for his ideas on liberty and freedom.