lincoln
In Mexico City there is a mural by Diego Rivera which depicts Hernando Cortez as a one-eyed syphilitic hunchback. What this lacks in historical accuracy it makes up for by faithfully reflecting the artist's attitude toward the conquistadors. We are repeatedly told on public television that Lincoln was a clearly heroic figure. If heroism is measured by the size of the pile of corpses a man leaves behind, this is correct. We must not let our emotions deprive us of objectivity. Lincoln was neither one-eyed, hunchbacked nor syphilitic but on the other hand, he never deserved the name of "Honest Abe". Like some other politicians, maybe all politicians, he spoke with a forked tongue.Lincoln came to power at a unique time, with a unique opportunity to decide the fate of the nation and of a million of his fellow citizens, who wound up as casualties of the Civil War. There was no lack of counsel. Editor Horace Greeley and a host of others advised letting the seceding states go in peace. More ardent abolitionists were outraged by this suggestion. Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell welcomed a civil war as an antidote to the greed of Northern merchants and the cruelty of Southern slave owners. Outgoing President Buchanan thoug
Thus the resourceful (some would say two-faced) president who would not risk the union to free the slaves turned to freeing the slaves to save the union. After all, the British had burned the White House less than half a century before. He reversed Buchanan's policy of giving up Southern military posts on demand, and the war was on. and you allow him to make war at his pleasure. As a minority president (from a field of four candidates) his mandate was thin; his party platform did not call for abolition, but merely containing slavery within its present borders. Because the King had always been involving and impoverishing the people in wars the Constitution had given that power to Congress. Ironically, Lincoln had previously opposed presidential war making. But the war proceeded slowly and there was always the threat of foreign intervention to maintain the flow of Southern cotton to English mills. Since preservation of the union was essential to such control he gladly embraced the opportunity to make himself a dictator, to usurp the power of Congress to raise and equip armies, spend unappropriated funds in the treasury, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, arbitrarily arresting citizens accused of preaching defeatism or advocating peace at any price and denying mail distribution to opposition newspapers he continued as de facto monarch for 77 days. To proclaim an anti-slavery crusade would substantially increase his problem. Lincoln told Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, that freeing the slaves was an absolute military necessity and the only way the war could be won. Herndon, his law partner back in Springfield, "Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he thinks it necessary to repel invasion.
Common topics in this essay:
Slave Power,
Southern Initiative,
President Buchanan,
North South,
Hernando Cortez,
Springfield Allow,
White House,
Honest Abe,
Declaration Independence,
South Midwest,
civil war,
slave power,
freeing slaves,
manifest destiny,
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Acceptance Essays
