[geeks] RIP, Ronald Reagan

[Phil Stracchino]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 06:37:40PM -0500, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> On Jun 6, 2004, at 5:45 PM, Andrew Weiss wrote:
> 
> >>>Personally, I'm inclined to argue the rot set in with Lincoln. He
> >>set
> >>>the government on the course of massive expansion of centralized
> >>Federal
> >>>power, took the country to civil war over the right to secede from
> >>the
> >>>Union, and freed the slaves in the Southern states (but not the
> >>North)
> >
> >I'm curious... what slaves in the North were NOT freed?

You might be surprised how many slaves there were in the North as
household servants etc.

> I suspect Phil was talking about the Emancipation Proclamation (1863?), 
> which did free slaves in the Confederacy (where the Federal law 
> couldn't be enforced at the time, but left alone the issue of slavery 
> in the border states and the North.

Correct.  And many slaves who escaped to the North were treated worse by
the North than they had been in the South.  There's a reason the
Underground Railroad ran to Canada.  The "liberating" Union army, in
particular, had a tendency to treat escaped slaves as spoils of war.

One of the quotations of Lincoln's that is less often quoted (and never
by those who seek to portray him as "the President who ended slavery")
is, "I would free all the slaves, if that would end the war; or I would
free none of the slaves, if that would end the war."

> For good reason, IMHO.  Lincoln was above all a realist whose goal was 
> the restoration of the country; The EP was a brilliant move for the 
> time.

Indeed.  It's merely that the history books portray it as a great
humanitarian act, when it wasn't done for humanitarian purposes at all.


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