Lincoln........not such a saint?

Tweet

This morning I read the following letter in a British newspaper - The Telegraph - from a Professor of International History at a leading University. He has also written books on the subject. I know that Lincoln is revered in the US and of course the facts about his indifference to slavery are much reported. However, are the Professor's comments valid? If so Lincoln ought not or be regarded as a great President but as the man that created the circumstances for war and racial separation that lasted another 100 years after he died, and some would say has still not entirely absent from American attitudes. "[i]Honest Abe’s saintliness is greatly exaggerated SIR – Abraham Lincoln was a racist who deliberately started a war that killed more than 650,000 people (“The lure of Lincoln”, January 10). He had no intention of freeing slaves, who freed themselves by fleeing to Unionist lines during a war that was going badly for the North and in which they became needed as recruits. In September 1863, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation declared that the South could keep its slaves if it returned to the Union. Slave holders in the four slave states fighting for the Union were given until 1900 to consider emancipating their slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself did not free a single slave, since it was limited to territory controlled by the Confederacy. Until the day he died, Lincoln’s ideal solution to the problem of blacks was to “colonise” them back to Africa or the tropics. This was what he told a delegation of free blacks he summoned to the White House in the summer of 1863, when he stressed that the mere presence of blacks caused pain to white Americans. He eventually agreed to the 13th amendment, which freed all slaves. Americans ignore all this since otherwise the history of the civil war looks little better morally than America’s treatment of blacks before and after. Steven Spielberg’s film sustains the myth that Lincoln redeemed America’s racist past. He did not. Alan Sked Professor of International History London School of Economics London WC2"[/i]