For 150 years, a monstrous lie has been perpetrated on the students in the public school system of the United States. The lie portrays Abraham Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator who freed the slaves.”
Lincoln never freed one slave. He did not have the authority to do so. Slavery was constitutionally legal in the entire United States until Dec. 18, 1865, after Lincoln was dead. For those who believe the lie, if you will do a little thinking of your own, you will ask why it took until 1865 for the 13th Amendment to be enacted. It surely would have been easy to pass the amendment, once all the Southern members of Congress left Washington.
Logic forces the question “why didn’t Lincoln ask congress to pass the amendment and send it to him for his signature?” Instead, he made a speech, which has been called by his supporters “Emancipation Proclamation ,” in which he declared the slaves held in the states in rebellion to be free. He had no authority to circumvent the Constitution with such an order.
The speech was aimed more as a military ruse than as a humanitarian action. Lincoln knew that if the slaves in the South started killing the wives and children of Confederate soldiers, some of the soldiers would leave the battlefield and go home to protect their families.
Another purpose for the speech was to convince the slaves that his fight was their fight. It worked. Nearly 200,000 black slaves and ex-slaves joined the Union army. The problem with the Emancipation Proclamation is that it did not free slaves being held in the states not in rebellion.
Secretary of State William H. Seward commented “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.” There can be no doubt that Lincoln was more concerned in defeating the Confederacy than freeing slaves. Otherwise, Kentucky, Delaware and West Virginia could not have held slaves until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865.
It is also a lie that the War of Northern Aggression was a civil war. A war between two countries is not a civil war. The closest thing to a civil war that has occurred in the United States was when the mobs were burning the cities in the 1970s in order to steal whatever they could lay their hands on. Remember the video of the man trying to put a large home entertainment system in a VW?
Jimmy C. Kimble
Enterprise
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