Quotes from the "Great Emancipator"
     
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Let's see what he had to say about the slaves...

 


Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press:

"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."



An address by Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol II, pp 408-9, Basler, ed.]:

"A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. Such separation, if ever affected at all, must be effected by colonization The enterprise is a difficult one, but 'where there is a will there is a way:' and what colonization needs now is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and at the same time, favorable to, or at least not against our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be."



"The Great Proclamation" (1960), Commager, Henry Steele; "Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation" (1964), Donovan, Frank; "The Emancipation Proclamation" (1964), Franklin, John Hope, ed.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION:

Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued."

NOTE - Slavery was NOT abolished in one Confederate (Tennessee) and four Union states (Maryland, Delaware. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri).



Abraham Lincoln 1859 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol III, pp 399, Basler, ed.]

"Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?" --

Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.,: Rutgers University Press:

"Send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit this."



Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings," Roy Basler, ed. 1946, New York: Da Capo:

"Some ten years later, in his December 1, 1862, message to Congress, Lincoln reiterated that 'I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization."

"Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation," Ira Berlin, 1987, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:

"In an April 16, 1863, letter to the War Department regarding the fate of ex-slaves should emancipation become a reality, Lincoln wrote, ''They had better be set to digging their sustinence out of the ground.'"





History of the administration of President Lincoln: including his speeches, letters, addresses, proclamations, and messages. With a preliminary sketch of his life; Raymond, Henry J.; 1864, New York, J. C. Derby & N. C. Miller, pp. 213

Pres. Lincoln's response of September 13, 1862, to a call for a General Emancipation:

"Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that the law has caused a single slave to come over to us."





Overland Monthly and Out West magazine/Volume 9, Issue 52, San Francisco, 1887, pp. 540, 541 - "An Episode of the Civil War," John T. Doyle

"At another time, Mr. Lincoln publicly recommended Central America to a delegation of blacks who waited on him, as suited by climate and so forth to colonization by their people.

In the fall of 1862 there appeared in New York a certain Mr. Koch, with a queer story and a queer project...he had conceived the project of taking to Santo Domingo a colony of blacks from the United States, procuring a grant of land, and settling them on it, to raise cotton.

Mr. Lincoln was entirely captivated by it; ...The President made a contract with him (Koch) for the transportation of the first colony of blacks, four hundred in number, to his (Koch's) island of La Veche, at the price, I think, of per head; to be paid, one half when the colonists had embarked, and the other half when they were safely landed on the island.

Before many months were over, the President was constrained as a matter of mere humanity to send a vessel of war after the poor fellows, and the remainder of them was brought back and landed in Boston.

The last thing I heard of them was a public meeting under violent anti-slavery auspices to denounce the brutal and inhuman conduct of President Lincoln, in sending these poor men into exile; and one or two of the negroes themselves appeared at the meeting in support of the resolutions!

John T. Doyle"





"Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel; Laissez Faire Books

"The Lincoln Administration imprisoned at least 14,000 (Northern) civilians throughout the course of the war. ... The federal government simultaneously monitored and censored both the mails and telegraphs. ... It also suppressed newspapers. Over three hundred, including the Chicago Times, the New York World, and the Philadelphia Evening Journal, had to cease publication for varying periods."



"Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel; Laissez Faire Books

Former Democratic Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, running for governor, "delivered a speech in May 1863 that accused the President of unnecessarily prolonging the conflict. The Union commander in Ohio" -- never a war zone -- "rousted Vallandigham from his home at night and jailed him. A military court handed down a sentence of confinement for the war's duration, but public indignation forced Lincoln to commute the sentence to exile behind Confederate lines."



will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races

-- Abraham Lincoln



Gen. Donn Piatt re: Lincoln

I hear of him and read of him in eulogies and biographies, and fail to recognize the man I encountered for the first time in the canvass that called him from private life to be President of the United States. Piatt then goes on to describe a conference that he and General Schenck had with Lincoln in his home in Springfield. "I soon discovered that this strange and strangely gifted man, while not at all cynical, was a skeptic; his view of human nature was low; . . . he unconsciously accepted for himself and his party the same low line that he awarded the South. Expressing no sympathy for the slave, he laughed at the Abolitionists as a disturbing element easily controlled, without showing any dislike to the slave-holders. . . . We were not at a loss to get at the fact and the reason for it, in the man before us. Descended from the poor-whites of a slave State, through many generations, he inherited the contempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negroes. A self-made man, . . . his strong nature was built on what he inherited, and he could no more feel a sympathy with the abolition of slavery, but held fanatics, as Abolitionists were called, in utter abhorrence. While it seemed a cheap philanthropy, and therefore popular, to free another man's slave, the unrequited toil of the slave was more valuable to the North than to the South. *

Lincoln's white supremacist ideas are a well-kept secret. (Let it be known at this point that these views are Lincoln's and not the opinions of the authors.) In an 1858 debate Lincoln made the following statements**:

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races. . . .I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.***

Some of the lesser known facts about the"great emancipator":

To silence his critics in the North, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The political prisoner count from this move was estimated by some to be as high as forty thousand.

Violated the First Amendment right to freedom of the press by shutting down 300-plus newspapers and journals by executive order.

Promoted Colonel John B. Turchin to the rank of Brigadier General of the United States Volunteers even though he was under a court-martial for crimes against civilians (and later convicted).



*The Real Lincoln, by L.C. Minor, copyrighted 1928,
by Atkins-Rankin Co., Sprinkle Publications
P.O. Box 1094 Harrisonburg, Virginia 22801

**The South was Right!, by James Ronald Kennedy
and Walter Donald Kennedy, Gretna, LA: Pelican
Publishing Company, 1994, 431 pages, hardcover.

***Abraham Lincoln, as cited in The Lincoln-Douglas
Debates of 1858, edited by R.W. Johannsen (Oxford
University Press, New York, NY: 1965), pp. 162-63