A lot of Americans know the 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, as a champion of black freedom who supported social equality of the races and has been credited for freeing black slaves from the South. But a new book may change this view....
Read more …A lot of Americans know the 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, as a champion of black freedom who supported social equality of the races and has been credited for freeing black slaves from the South. But a new book may change this view.
According to Philip Magness and Sebastian Page, authors of the book “Colonization After Emancipation," President Lincoln continued to support colonization, engaging in secret diplomacy with the British to establish a colony in British Honduras, now Belize. He was also considering resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.
Yet in most black communities, despite harsh critiques of his position about blacks by historians such as Magness and Page, Lincoln continues to be the champion of emancipation. Three days before he was shot, Lincoln stood on the second floor of the White House and made a speech to a crowd while celebrating the recent Union victory over the Confederacy. Lincoln told the cheering crowd that he had decided to recommend that his 200,000 black troops and “the very intelligent Negroes” be given the right to vote.
Photo: The Walrus Speaks
