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| Re: WSJ interview with Jeb Bush: GOP must be national party, moderate on immigration, push school ch (415462) | |||
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Re: WSJ interview with Jeb Bush: GOP must be national party, moderate on immigration, push school ch |
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Posted by trainsarefun on Sun Feb 15 22:13:56 2009, in response to Re: WSJ interview with Jeb Bush: GOP must be national party, moderate on immigration, push school ch, posted by Olog-hai on Sun Feb 15 21:41:20 2009. I didn't say that Lincoln was not in favor of legal equality, or that he viewed blacks as non-persons (as the law did in his day).I don't believe, however, that Lincoln ever expressed the view that blacks are not generally inferior to whites. Historians suggest that his views on racial equality moderated as he got older. At the time of his debates with Stephen Douglas he explicitly stated his view that blacks were inferior to whites, and even after this he was supportive of the "Back to Africa" movement. He was not in favor of emancipation until well into the war, and indeed, he actually booted Vermont's Brigadier General John Woolcott Phelps, who issued the first Emancipation Proclamation in December 1861 in Mississippi, right out of the Army for being too far ahead of his time! (Vermont was apparently home to gun toting progressives even back then, apparently!). Given Lincoln's method of taking the evidence seriously (I base this especially on Lincoln's demands against President Polk regarding the illegality of the Mexican War in the 1840s), if he had been presented with a case for racial equality, he might have seized on it as correct. Perhaps if he had not been assassinated, he was very close to this. But it isn't apparent that he in fact ever held such a view although he arguably close to the end of his life approached a quite progressive (for his time) view of matters. |
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