Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The Forgotten Men You Should Know About
"Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever ‘freed,’ they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life."
Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’ s White Dream, p. 19
Let me introduce you to Lerone Bennett, Jr. who was the executive editor of Ebony magazine for several decades (beginning in 1958) and the author of many books, including a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King) and Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Bennett is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta and authored hundreds of articles on African-American history and culture during his career at Ebony. He spent more than twenty years researching and writing Forced into Glory, a scathing critique of Abraham Lincoln based on mountains of truths.
Forced into Glory, published in 2000, was mostly ignored by the Lincoln cult, although there were a few timid "reviews" by reviewers that have never done one-thousandth of the research that Lerone Bennett did on the subject. As a black man, he was spared the mantra of being "linked to extremist hate groups" by the lily-white leftists at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the preeminent hate group of the hardcore Left. He was also spared that hate group’s normally automatic insinuation that any critic of Lincoln must secretly wish that slavery had never ended. They mostly sat back and hoped that he would go away.
Lerone Bennett, Jr. contends that it is almost impossible for the average citizen to know much of anything about Lincoln despite the fact that literally thousands of books have been written about him. "A century of lies" is how he describes Lincoln "scholarship." He provides thousands of documented facts to make his case.
On the subject of Steven Spielberg’s new movie on Lincoln, which is entirely about Lincoln’s supposed role in lobbying for the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery, Bennett points out: "There is a pleasant fiction that Lincoln . . . became a flaming advocate of the amendment and used the power of his office to buy votes to ensure its passage. There is no evidence, as David H. Donald has noted, to support that fiction . . ." To the extent that Lincoln did finally and hesitatingly support the amendment, Bennett argues that it was he who was literally forced into it by other politicians, not the other way around as portrayed in the Spielberg film. (David Donald, by the way, is the preeminent Lincoln scholar of our day and Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer).
On the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, Bennett correctly points out that "J.G. Randall, who has been called ‘the greatest Lincoln scholar of all time,’ said the Proclamation itself did not free a single slave" since it only applied to rebel territory and specifically exempted areas of the U.S. such as the entire state of West Virginia where the U.S. Army was in control at the time. (James G. Randall was indeed the most prolific Lincoln scholar of all time and the academic mentor of David Donald at the University of Illinois).
Lerone Bennett is understandably outraged at how the Lincoln cult has covered up Lincoln’s racism for over a century, pretending that he was not a man of his time. He quotes Lincoln as saying in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in Ottawa, Illinois, for example, that he denied "to set the niggers and white people to marrying together" (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3, p. 20). In Forced into Glory Bennett shows that Lincoln rather compulsively used the N-word; was a huge fan of "black face" minstrel shows; was famous for his racist jokes; and that many of his White House appointees were shocked at his racist language.
Lincoln did not hesitate to broadcast his racist views publicly, either. Bennett quotes his speech during a debate with Douglas in Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858 (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3, pp. 145-146):
"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 which I believe will for ever forbid the two races 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."
Bennett documents that Lincoln stated publicly that "America was made for the White people and not for the Negroes" (p. 211), and "at least twenty-one times, he said publicly that he was opposed to equal rights for Blacks." "What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races," said Lincoln (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 521).
Reading through Forced into Glory, one gets the clear impression that Bennett got angrier and angrier at the non-stop excuse-making, lying, cover-ups, and fabrications of the "Lincoln scholars." He never takes his eye of the ball, however, and is relentless in throwing facts in the faces of the Lincoln cultists.
As a member of the Illinois legislature Lincoln urged the legislature "to appropriate money for colonization in order to remove Negroes from the state and prevent miscegenation" (p. 228). As president, Lincoln toiled endlessly with plans to "colonize" (i.e., deport) all of the black people out of America. This is what Bennett calls Lincoln’s "White Dream," and more recent research of the very best caliber supports him. I refer to the book Colonization after Emancipation by Phillip Magness of American University and Sebastian Page of Oxford University that, using records from the American and British national archives, proves that until his dying day Lincoln was negotiating with Great Britain and other foreign governments to deport all of the soon-to-be-freed slaves out of the U.S.
The Lincoln cult, which has fabricated excuses for everything, argued for years that Lincoln mysteriously abandoned his obsession with "colonization" sometime around 1863. Magness and Page prove this to be the nonsense that it is.
In Illinois, the state constitution was amended in 1848 to prohibit free black people from residing in the state. Lincoln supported it. He also supported the Illinois Black Codes, under which "Illinois Blacks had no legal rights. White people were bound to respect." "None of this disturbed Lincoln," writes Bennett.
Bennett also points out the clear historical fact that Lincoln strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Act which forced Northerners to hunt down runaway slaves and return them to their owners. He admittedly never said a word about slavery in public until he was in his fifties, while everyone else in the nation was screaming about the issue. When he did oppose slavery, Bennett points out, it was always in the abstract, accompanied by some statement to the effect that he didn’t know what could be done about it. And as a presidential candidate he never opposed Southern slavery, only the extension of slavery into the territories, explaining that "we" wanted to preserve the Territories "for free White people" (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3, p. 311). In Bennett’s own words: "One must never forget that Lincoln always spoke in tongues or in a private code when he was talking about slavery or Negroes. And although he said or seemed to say that slavery was wrong, he always qualified the assertion in the same speech or in a succeeding speech, saying either that slavery was wrong in an abstract sense or that it was wrong in so far as it sought to spread itself." He was a master politician, after all, which as Murray Rothbard once said, means that he was a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator.
All of these truths, and many more, have been ignored, swept under the rug, or buried under thousands of pages of excuses by the Lincoln cult over the past century and more in books and in films like the new Lincoln film by Steven Spielberg. After spending a quarter of a century researching and writing on the subject, Lerone Bennett, Jr. concluded that "Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own preists and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in ‘the great emancipator’ and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him" (p. 114). And "with rare exceptions, you can’t believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race." Amen, Brother Lerone.
If you go to the Territory opposed to slavery, and another man comes upon t e same ground with his slave, upon the assum tion that the things are equal, it turns out that he has the equal rig t all his way, and you have no part of it your way. If he goes in and makes it a slave Territory, and by consequence a slave State, is it not time that those who desire to have it a free State were on equal ground? Let me suggest it in a different way. How many Democrats are there about here [“A thousand”] who have left slave States and come into the free State of Illinois to get rid of the institution of slavery? [Another voice: “A thousand and one.”] I reckon there are a thousand and one. I will ask you, if the policy you are now advocating had prevailed when this country was in a territorial condition, where would you have gone to get rid of it? Where would you have found your free State or Territory to go to? And when hereafter, for any cause, the people in this place shall desire to find new homes, if they wish to be rid of the institution, where will they find the place to go to?
Now, irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—may find some spot where they can better their condition—where they can settle upon new soil, and better their condition in life_ I am in favor of this not merely (I must say it here as I have elsewhere) for our own people who are born amongst us, but as an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over—in which Hans, and Baptiste, and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their condition in life.
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"The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people." ~ Lincoln, on whether blacks – slave or free – should be allowed in the new territories in the west, October 16
In his 1899 “Life of Lincoln” Norman Hapgood wrote that “Charles A. Dana testifies that the whole power of the [United States] War Department was used to secure Lincoln’s re-election on 1864. There is no doubt that this is true. Purists may turn pale at such things, but the world wants no prettified portrait of Mr. Lincoln’s Jesuitical ability to use the fox’s skin when the lion’s proves too short and that was one part of his enormous value.” The military was depended upon to deliver the soldier vote and ensure civilian ballots for the Republicans.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com The Great American Political Divide
Events Leading to Lincoln’s Second Election
“Lincoln’s second election was largely committed to the War and Navy Departments of the Federal government, he having been nominated by the same radical Republican Party . . . that nominated him at Chicago in 1860 . . .
Lincoln made criticism of his administration treason triable by court-martial, and United States soldiers ruled at the polls. General B.F. Butler’s book gives full particulars of the large force with which he controlled completely the voters of New York City; and McClure’s book, “Our Presidents,” tells “how necessary the army vote was, and was secured”; and Ida Tarbell says: “It was declared that Lincoln had been guilty of all the abuses of a military dictatorship.”
Lincoln’s [military] success was not won by the North, for a large part of the people were against Lincoln’s policy of coercion. So, seeing voluntary enlistments ceasing, and the draft unpopular, by offering large bounties and other inducements, Lincoln secured recruits, as follows: 176,800 Germans, 144,200 Irish, 99,000 English and British-Americans, 74,000 other foreigners, 186,017 Negroes, and from the border States 344,190, making a grand total of 1,151,660 men.
Therefore, had Lincoln depended on Northern volunteers to extricate himself from the desperate toils in which he was involved by his own willful and criminal war policy, he would surely have lost out; for, in 1864, there was great reaction against him.
Finally, let it not be forgotten, that [the] principle of government by the consent of the people [for which the South fought] was the rock on which our fathers of 1776 had built the “new and more perfect” Union of States; and later, was the fundamental principle of the Union of the Southern Confederacy . . .”
(Cornelius B. Hite, Washington, DC, Confederate Veteran, July, 1926, excerpts, pp. 248-249) Edited Sun Dec 20 2015, 03:13PM
The author quoted below, US Navy Captain and Virginia-native Russell Quynn, was a veteran of both World Wars and a member of the Virginia bar since 1941. He writes that against the North, “the armies of the South at peak strength never exceeded 700,000 men,” and that “imported “Hessians” were used “by Lincoln to crush Americans of the South whose fathers had served in the armies of Washington, Jackson, Taylor, to make the nation, to found its renown.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org The Great American Political Divide
“It Was Lincoln Who Made War” “Jefferson Davis, with his family, was captured in the Georgia pines on May 10, 1865, while en route to the Trans Mississippi, where he had hoped forces were still intact to continue the struggle Johnston and Beauregard had given up to Sherman at Durham, North Carolina . . . The odds now were ten to one; the North was being armed with Spencer-magazine repeating rifles, against the Confederates muzzle-loaders, to turn the war into mass murder. During the four years of war the Northern armies had been replenished with large-scale inductions of more than 720,000 immigrant males from Europe; who were promised bounties and pensions that the South afterwards largely had to pay (see the Union Department of War records). Charged with detestable crimes that, it was only too well known, he could not be guilty of, Davis was unable to obtain a hearing, and finally was released. A bail bond of $100,000 had been posted for him, oddly enough, by some of the men who had been his bitterest enemies – Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, Vanderbilt, and others among the twenty men who pledged $5,000 each in federal court. Davis himself thought that “. . . by reiteration of such inappropriate terms as “rebellion” and treason,” and the asseveration that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant of the nature of the Union, and of the reserved powers of the States, have been led to believe that the Confederate States were in the condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced to resort to arms for the preservation of their existence . . . The Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and the States had never surrendered their sovereignty . . . It was a palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying their mandates, the terms “rebellion” and “treason”; and, further, the Confederacy, so far from making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had an official organ, strove earnestly by peaceful recognition, to equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their late associates.” It was Lincoln who “made war.” Still another perversion, Davis thought, “was the attempted arraignment of the men who formed the Confederacy, and who bore arms in its defense, as “instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.” Of course, it was a palpable absurdity, and but part of the unholy vengeance, which did not cease at the grave.” (The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts, Russell H. Quynn, Exposition Press, 1959, excerpts pp. 126-128) Edited Tue Feb 12 2019, 05:59PM Back to top
The “Myth of Saving the Glorious Union” invented by the North during the war cannot survive the scrutiny of honest historians; war was made on Americans in the South who desired political independence and liberty -- no fraternal Union of the Founders’ was saved at bayonet point. It was all about Radical Republican rule and hegemony.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission www.ncwbts150.com "The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Fraudulent Election Mandates:
“The Jacobins faced the fall [1864] elections with a swaggering confidence and a determination to wipe out the losses of the previous year when the Democrats came perilously close to gaining control of Congress.
But the most potent force working for Republican victory was [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton….who dashed off letters [to party leaders] offering to furlough home enough soldiers to swing the elections. The solider votes which Stanton poured into the ballot boxes carried the day in many States, notably Pennsylvania, where Curtin held on to the governorship my a narrow margin. “This State has really been carried by fraud,” one Republican admitted to Sherman, “but we have control of the State which is very important.” Another said Curtin would have been defeated “if it had not been for the soldier [vote].”
The Jacobin press cried that the election returns were a mandate to the administration from the North to advance further and faster in the direction of radicalism and the New Jerusalem….”The elections were an indorsement of the government’s…aggressive, not its conservative zeal, and of its iron hand, not of its silk glove method with the rebellion.”
(Lincoln and the Radicals, T. Harry Williams, University of Wisconsin Press, 1965, pp. 292-294) Back to top
The Lincoln administration utilized both censorship and propaganda in its effort to conceal the immense carnage and early defeats from the Northern public, as well as portray the South as murderers of noble Union soldiers who were defending the Founders’ republic. After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the campaign of hatred toward the South intensified to ensure that the South would remain a subject colony and economic wasteland — plus a source of freedmen votes to ensure Republican political hegemony. That mobilization of hate toward the South continues unabated to this day.
It is true that Northern men hated the draft and did not flock to the colors; generous bounties were required to attract recruits and most often these were foreigners. Many posed the question the North was reluctant to ask: “If the cause of the Union was such a noble one, why was there so much violent opposition to the idea of fighting for it.” It was British propaganda that helped bring America into the First World War, despite a president being elected on a pledge of no American boys dying on European battlefields.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com The Great American Political Divide
Mobilizing the Hate of the People
“There was no richer field for propaganda than the United States of America in the first years of the war. Atrocities, Germany’s sole responsibility, the criminal Kaiser, and all the other fabrications started in Great Britain, were worked up by American liars with great effect.
The Belgian baby with no hands was a special favorite. There was hardly a household in which it was not discussed all over that vast continent, and even so ridiculous a scare as the concrete platforms for German guns was current in California. Villages were burned [by the Germans], women carried off, and various cruelties perpetrated.
After America entered into the war a number of “actual war picture” films (prepared at Hollywood) were released. An immense army of speakers and pamphleteers were employed by the Committee on Public Information, and the country was flooded with literature describing the inequities of the Hun.
An interesting volume on the technique of propaganda was recently published by [political scientist and communications theorist] Professor [Howard D.] Lasswell, of Chicago, from which the following passage may be quoted: “So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate. The war must . . . be due . . . to the rapacity of the enemy. Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically, and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier. If the propagandist is to mobilize the hate of the people, he must see to it that everything is circulated which establishes the sole responsibility of the enemy.”
(Falsehood in Wartime, Propaganda Lies of the First World War, Arthur Ponsonby, E.P. Dutton, 1929, excerpts pp. 180-182) Back to top
William P. Dole was Lincoln’s patronage-picked Commissioner of Indian Affairs, appointed to office on March 8, 1861. Dole “had made the necessary bargains that swung the votes of the Pennsylvania and Indiana delegations to Lincoln,” and thus won the new president’s first federal appointment. As Republican party railroad support and homesteading policy was attracting white settlers to the West, many tribal lands and previous Indian treaties got in the way of progress.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission www.ncwbts150.com "The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Indian Affairs Under Lincoln:
“Dole began working closely with [Wisconsin Republican] Senator James R. Doolittle, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to conclude treaties with all Indian tribes not yet covered by binding agreements. Nearly every treaty contained the Indian Bureau’s careful description of tribal lands, along with an equally careful disclaimer inserted by senators to eliminate any possibility that the treaty might be interpreted as a recognition of Indian title to the land.
When a few Southern tribes joined the Confederacy, Dole began to press for confiscation of their lands in present Oklahoma so that other tribes might be settled on them after the war. This idea had a great deal of appeal, since it seemed to solve the problem of where to put the Indians of Kansas and Nebraska whose land was coveted by white settlers and speculators.
[Episcopal] Bishop Henry B. Whipple had called for an end to whiskey smuggling on the reservation….[and] During the fall of 1862. Bishop Whipple visited Lincoln to plead for mercy for the 303 Indian warriors sentenced to death by [General John Pope’s] military court for their part in the Sioux uprising.
Dole interpreted Pope’s [draconian resettlement] proposal to mean that the general wanted to herd all Indians together in one vast reserve where white civilization could not intrude. He…wondered just how Pope proposed to bring hostile warriors onto his reservation without involving the nation in a bloody Indian war.
Something very much like Pope’s policy was being tried in New Mexico with disastrous results. During 1862 and 1863, the army moved several thousand Navajos and Mescalero Apaches onto a reservation….both groups rebelled at the harsh surroundings and the strict control imposed by the military. Indians fled from the reservation faster than troops could find them and return them to captivity.
[It was] a military operation that brought Dole’s tenure to an end. Colonel John M. Chivington and his volunteer militiamen massacred a sleeping camp of Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in late November 1864. An outraged Congress immediately demanded the removal of the army officers, Indian agents and politicians who were in any way involved in the events leading up to the episode.
Lincoln tried to save the career of old his friend from Illinois, but a few weeks after Lincoln’s assassination President Andrew Johnson removed Dole without much ceremony.”
(The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824-1977, Kvasnicka & Viola, editors, University of Nebraska Press, 1979, pp. 91-95)
The freedmen did not receive the franchise after the war because of their political maturity and judgment, the clear intent was to simply keep the Republican party in power with bloc-voting. The Republican party’s Union League organization taught the Southern black man to hate his white neighbor and vote for Northern men whose own State’s practiced Jim Crow laws. Leon Litwack’s 1961 book, “North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860,” (Chicago, 1961) is an excellent reference for understanding racial views in the antebellum North.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission www.ncwbts150.com "The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Lincoln’s White Supremacy Party:
“The Republican leaders were quite aware in 1865 that the issue of Negro status and rights was closely connected with the two other great issues of Reconstruction – who should reconstruct the South and who should govern the country. They were increasingly conscious that in order to reconstruct the South along the lines they planned they would require the support and the votes of the freedmen.
And it was apparent to some that once the reconstructed States were restored to the Union the Republicans would need the votes of the freedmen to retain control over the national government. While they could agree on this much, they were far from agreeing on the status, the rights, the equality, or the future of the Negro.
The fact was that the constituency on which the Republican congressmen relied in the North lived in a race-conscious, segregated society devoted to the doctrine on white supremacy and Negro inferiority.
“In virtually every phase of existence,” writes Leon Litwack with regard to the North in 1860, “Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats and assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants and resorts, except as servants; they prayed in “Negro pews” in the white churches….Moreover, they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries.”
Ninety-three per cent of the 225,000 Northern Negroes in 1860 lived in States that denied them the ballot, and 7 per cent lived in the five New England States that permitted them to vote. Ohio and New York had discriminatory qualifications that practically eliminated Negro voting.
Ohio denied them poor relief, and most States of the old Northwest had laws carrying penalties against Negroes settling in those States. Everywhere in the free States the Negro met with barriers to job opportunities, and in most places he encountered severe limitations to the protection of his life, liberty and property.
[Many Republican leaders], like Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the close friend of Lincoln, found no difficulty in reconciling antislavery with anti-Negro views. “We, the Republican party,” said Senator Trumbull in 1858,” are the white man’s party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor respectable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” [And] William H. Seward, who in 1860 described the American Negro as “a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation”; [and], Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who firmly disavowed any belief “in the mental or intellectual equality of the African race with this proud and domineering race of ours.”
(Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy, C. Vann Woodward, New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction, Harold M. Hyman, editor, pp. 125-127)
Main Admin Main Admin Registered Member #1 Joined: Tue Jul 17 2007, 02:46PM Posts: 3555 "Abraham Lincoln, Protest on Slavery to the Illinois Statehouse, March 3, 1837,"
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Folks this is going to be a series on Abe Lincoln. Source will be as noted. My notes again will be at the end.
*********************************************** Protest in Illinois Legislature on Slavery
March 3, 1837
The following protest was presented to the House, which was read and ordered to be spread on the journals, to wit:
``Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.
They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.
They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.
They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.
The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions, is their reason for entering this protest.''
DAN STONE, A. LINCOLN,
Representatives from the county of Sangamon.
"Abraham Lincoln, Protest on Slavery to the Illinois Statehouse, March 3, 1837," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/40419.
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it is hard to determine exactly who "they" refers to, Lincoln and Stone perhaps? The General Assembly? I think the General Assembly. Regardless note that Lincoln and Stone offer nothing disputing the claim slavery is legal under the Constitution.
"Abraham Lincoln to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841,"
Bloomington, Illinois Sept. 27th. 1841
Miss Mary Speed Louisville, Ky.
My Friend:
Having resolved to write to some of your mother's family, and not having the express permission of any one of them [to] do so, I have had some little difficulty in determining on which to inflict the task of reading what I now feel must be a most dull and silly letter; but when I remembered that you and I were something of cronies while I was at Farmington, and that, while there, I once was under the necessity of shutting you up in a room to prevent your committing an assault and battery upon me, I instantly decided that you should be the devoted one.
I assume that you have not heard from Joshua & myself since we left, because I think it doubtful whether he has written.
You remember there was some uneasiness about Joshua's health when we left. That little indisposition of his turned out to be nothing serious; and it was pretty nearly forgotten when we reached Springfield. We got on board the Steam Boat Lebanon, in the locks of the Canal about 12. o'clock. M. of the day we left, and reached St. Louis the next monday at 8 P.M. Nothing of interest happened during the passage, except the vexatious delays occasioned by the sand bars be thought interesting. By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from, the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparantly happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that ``God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,'' or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.
To return to the narative. When we reached Springfield, I staid but one day when I started on this tedious circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much, that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone; the consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk, nor eat. I am litterally ``subsisting on savoury remembrances''---that is, being unable to eat, I am living upon the remembrance of the delicious dishes of peaches and cream we used to have at your house. When we left, Miss Fanny Henning was owing you a visit, as I understood. Has she paid it yet? If she has, are you not convinced that she is one of the sweetest girls in the world? There is but one thing about her, so far as I could perceive, that I would have otherwise than as it is. That is something of a tendency to melancholly. This, let it be observed, is a misfortune not a fault. Give her an assurance of my verry highest regard, when you see her.
Is little Siss Eliza Davis at your house yet? If she is kiss her ``o'er and o'er again'' for me.
Tell your mother that I have not got her ``present'' with me; but that I intend to read it regularly when I return home. I doubt not that it is really, as she says, the best cure for the ``Blues'' could one but take it according to the truth.
Give my respects to all your sisters (including ``Aunt Emma'') and brothers. Tell Mrs. Peay, of whose happy face I shall long retain a pleasant remembrance, that I have been trying to think of a name for her homestead, but as yet, can not satisfy myself with one. I shall be verry happy to receive a line from you, soon after you receive this; and, in case you choose to favour me with one, address it to Charleston, Coles Co. Ills as I shall be there about the time to receive it.
Your sincere friend A. Lincoln
"Abraham Lincoln to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/40400. ***************************************************** No folks I have not changed coats, just trying to show all sides of the man who is responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any man in history.
Facts about “Honest Abe”--- Paul Williams on Facebookl • Failed to call Congress into session after the South fired upon Fort Sumter, in direct violation of the Constitution. • Called up an army of 75,000 men, bypassing the Congressional authority in direct violation of the Constitution. • Unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a function of Congress, violating the Constitution. This gave him the power, as he saw it, to arrest civilians without charge and imprison them indefinitely without trial—which he did. • Ignored a Supreme Court order to restore the right of habeas corpus, thus violating the Constitution again and ignoring the Separation of Powers which the Founders put in place exactly for the purpose of preventing one man’s using tyrannical powers in the executive. • When the Chief Justice forwarded a copy of the Supreme Court’s decision to Lincoln, he wrote out an order for the arrest of the Chief Justice and gave it to a U.S. Marshall for expedition, in violation of the Constitution. • Unilaterally ordered a naval blockade of southern ports, an act of war, and a responsibility of Congress, in violation of the Constitution. • Commandeered and closed over 300 newspapers in the North, because of editorials against his war policy and his illegal military invasion of the South. This clearly violated the First Amendment freedom of speech and press clauses. • Sent in Army forces to destroy the printing presses and other machinery at those newspapers, in violation of the Constitution. • Arrested the publishers, editors and owners of those newspapers, and imprisoned them without charge and without trial for the remainder of the war, all in direct violation of both the Constitution and the Supreme Court order aforementioned. • Arrested and imprisoned, without charge or trial, another 15,000-20,000 U.S. citizens who dared to speak out against the war, his policies, or were suspected of anti-war feelings. (Relative to the population at the time, this would be equivalent to President G.W. Bush arresting and imprisoning roughly 150,000-200,000 Americans without trial for “disagreeing” with the Iraq war; can you imagine?) • Sent the Army to arrest the entire legislature of Maryland to keep them from meeting legally, because they were debating a bill of secession; they were all imprisoned without charge or trial, in direct violation of the Constitution. • Unilaterally created the state of West Virginia in direct violation of the Constitution. • Sent 350,000 Northern men to their deaths to kill 350,000 Southern men in order to force the free and sovereign states of the South to remain in the Union they, the people, legally voted to peacefully withdraw from, all in order to continue the South’s revenue flow into the North. 
Lincoln stated, "I have urged the colonization of the negroes, and I shall continue. My Emancipation Proclamation was linked with this plan. There is no room for two distinct races of white men in America, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal.... We can never attain the ideal union our fathers dreamed of, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor desirable." (Lincoln address delivered at Washington, D.C.; in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume V, pages 371-375.)
