Tear Down That Monument

The totalitarian socialists among us who try to disguise their true beliefs by calling themselves “progressives” are currently in the middle of one of their periodic fits of hyper-PC hysteria.  Upon learning that the mentally deranged, drugged-up little monster who murdered all those people in a Charleston church had his picture taken with a Confederate flag, the “progressives” commenced a new crusade to obliterate not only the Confederate flag from American memory, but also the memory of anyone in history whose views on race are not identical to theirs.  They have even called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial; and the July 4 Daily Caller included an article about a Portland, Oregon teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in that city who has started a campaign to rename the school.  The Daily Caller refers to Wilson as “a model progressive Democrat,” which he was, but he was also a racist and a white supremacist.

However racist Woodrow Wilson, the old Princeton University political science professor, might have been, his public utterances on race were nothing compared to those of the real darling and “model” of “progressives” everywhere (and of neocons everywhere as well) – Abraham Lincoln.  The following is a sampling of Lincoln’s racist and white supremacist beliefs (“CW” stands for Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, followed by the volume and page numbers):

“Free them [black slaves] and make them politically and socially our equal?  My own feelings will not admit of this . . . .  We can not then make them equals.” (CW, 2, 256).  “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” (CW, 2, 405).  “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.” (CW, 2, 521).  “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races .  .  .  .  I, as well as Judge [Stephen] Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position.” (CW, 2, 16).

“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 . . . .  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.” (CW, 3, 145-146).  “I will to the very last stand by the law of this state [i.e., Illinois], which forbids the marrying of white people with Negroes.” (CW, 3, 146).  “Senator Douglas remarked . . . that . . . this government was made for the white people and not for Negroes.  Why, in point of fact, I think so too.” (CW, 2, 281).

As proven in the book, Colonization After Emancipation by Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page (University of Missouri Press), Lincoln plotted and schemed to deport all black people out of the country – so-called “colonization” – until his dying day.  He even had his secretary of state, William Seward, hard at work figuring out how many ships it would take, and negotiating with foreign governments about land purchases where the former American black people could be dumped.  “I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation,” he declared, and “such separation . . . must be affected by colonization.” (CW, 2, 409).  “Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and  . . . favorable to . . . our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime [i.e., Africa], he said (CW, 2, 409).  “The place I am thinking about having for a colony is in Central America.  It is nearer to us than Liberia.” (CW, 5, 373-374).

Lincoln supported Southern slavery in his first inaugural address, promising to support its explicit enshrinement in the Constitution via the Corwin Amendment, which had just passed the House and Senate, thanks to the efforts of William Seward, working on Lincoln’s instruction.  He opposed only the extension of slavery into the Territories, but only so that they could remain the domain of “free white people.”  He very strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Act that compelled Northerners to round up runaway slaves and return them to their owners, and enforced it during his presidency.  He championed the Illinois Black Codes, and supported the Illinois constitution’s prohibition of black people migrating into his state.  He never defended a runaway slave in court, but he did defend a slave owner in court.

According to the book, Lincoln, by Harvard’s David Donald, the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the last generation (and contrary to Stephen Spielberg’s silly movie), Lincoln barely lifted a finger to help get the Thirteenth Amendment passed, even refusing to help the genuine abolitionists when they asked him for political assistance in procuring votes from the New Jersey delegation to Congress.

As Lerone Bennett, Jr., the longtime editor of Ebony magazine wrote in his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Lincoln so habitually used the N-word that he sometimes befuddled and embarrassed members of Congress and others with his obsessive use of the racial slur.  He was also a devoted fan of “minstrel shows” that portrayed black people as buffoons, wrote Bennett.

If today’s “progressives” want to begin tearing down what they believe to be monuments to America’s racist past, they should start with the Lincoln Memorial.