Lerone Bennett, Jr., a Black historian, discusses Lincoln's racial prejudice, the Emancipation 'smokescreen' and his deportation agenda. From the time Lincoln settled in New Salem in 1831, until he left Illinois in 1861 for the White House, slaves and quasi-slaves were held, whipped, hunted, litigated and terrorized in that state.
Although there were few Blacks in state of Illinois...747 slaves and 1,637 free Blacks in 1830, Illinois Whites seemed to be obsessed by the subject of race. They adopted a comprehensive Black Code in 1819; and the Illinois legislature returned to the subject in 1825, 1831, 1833, 1841, and 1845.
These Black Codes or Laws would not be repealed until 1865. Blacks had no legal rights; it was a crime for them to settle in Illinois unless they could prove their freedom and post a $1,000 bond. Blacks found without a certificate of freedom was considered a runaway slave and could be apprehended by any White and auctioned off by the sheriff to pay the cost of his confinement. If a Black had a certificate, he and his family were required to meet reporting and registration procedures. The head of household had to register all family members and provide detailed descriptions to the supervisor of the poor, who could expel the whole family at any moment.
By the 1850s, especially after passage of the Compromise of 1850, which Lincoln voted for, kidnapping of Negroes with the aid and support of the state and White population, had become a profitable business.
Most trades and occupations were closed to Blacks. Real Estate was difficult to obtain. A law on the apprenticeship of children said "that the master or mistress to whom such child shall be bound as aforesaid shall cause such child to be taught to read and write and the ground rules of arithmetic...except when such apprentice is a negro or mulatto."
The state also taxed Blacks to support public schools that were closed by law, and by the vote of Lincoln, to Black children.
They could not play percussion instruments, could be apprehended for "riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, trespasses and seditious speeches." It was a crime for any person to permit "any slave or slaves, servant or servants of color, to the number of three or more, to assemble in his, her or their house, out house, yard or shed for the purpose of dancing or revelling, either by night or by day..."
A revised Illinois constitution in 1848, denied Blacks the right to vote and to serve in the state militia. The Negro Exclusion Law forbid slaves and free Negroes from settling in the state.
And where was Lincoln in all this? Silent. Lincoln was no emancipationist; he was scared to death of emancipation. He was scared of Black economic competition, Black and White voters and officeholders, and Black and White sex....I'm quoting Abraham Lincoln, and if you don't believe me, read pages 405, 407-409, and 541 of Volume 2; and pages 146, 234-5 of "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln."
The Emancipation Proclamation, if you have never read the document, along with the other proposed Congressional acts, including the Confiscation Act, you will find that it did not do what everyone thinks it did. They were not freed until the 13th Amendment. Lerone Bennett, Jr.'s book, "Forced into Glory" outlines precisely what it was and was not.
Lincoln didn't free the slaves. If it had been left up to him, Blacks would have remained in slavery to 1900 or longer. If he had had his way, millions of 20th Century Whites would have been in "Gone With the Wind," instead of watching it.
It was a limited document with devious aims. The men around Lincoln who knew him best, tell us, almost without exception, that the document was the incidental, accidental effort of a man who did everything he possibly could to avoid it.
As Professors Richard Current and Ralph Korngold have discovered, the Proclamation had as it's purpose and effect the checking of the Radical congressional program; that is to say, the program of immediate emancipation. Lincoln wanted to gain time to work on his own plan to free Blacks gradually, and to ship them out of the country in a colonization program. Part of his program included the payment of funds to slaveholders in exchange for their slaves, who would be shipped off to colonies away from the United States. He even proposed a Constitutional Amendment that would provide for the funding!
Put another way, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln re-enslaved and/or condemned to extended slavery more Blacks than he ever freed.
Consider Lincoln's "slow-walking" emancipation in the District of Columbia. (In 1863, there was still a slave market within 1 block of the White House).
In the Spring of 1862, he sat on the bill for 2 nights. Why? Believe it or not, it is because he had promised an old Kentucky friend that he wouldn't sign the bill until the friend could leave town with two of his slaves. In a startling and revealing statement, Lincoln said he regretted that District of Columbia slaves had been freed at once, "that it should have been for gradual emancipation," and "that now families would at once be deprived of cooks, stable boys etc. and they of their protectors without any provision for them."
Bennett presents Lincoln 'warts and all' holding nothing back. He tells us in explicit and documented detail Lincoln's own proposed Amendments to the Constitution. Lincoln's official plan for a new, all-White America, unfolded in his State of the Union message, on Monday, December 1, 1862. It included 3 Constitutional Amendments, which he asked the Congress to pass "as permanent constitutional law" one month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In brief these are they:
The first amendment, Lincoln's proposed 13th Amendment, called for the ending of slavery, not on January 1, 1863, but by January 1, 1900.
"Every State, wherein slavery now exists, which shall abolish the same therein, at any time, or times, before the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand and nine hundred, shall receive compensation from the United States..."
The Second Amendment, Lincoln's proposed 14th Amendment, discussed actual freedom and the compensation to loyal slaveowners.
"All slaves who shall have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of war, at any time before the end of the rebellion, shall be forever free; but all owners of such who shall not have been disloyal, shall be compensated for them..."
The 3rd Amendment, Lincoln's proposed 15th Amendment, called for the ethnic cleansing of the United States of America.
"Congress may appropriate money, and otherwise provide, for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States."
And what would happen if Congress refused to accept Lincoln's God-ordained way, "peaceful, generous, just," of buying slaves over a 37 year period and deporting them to a place "without the United States" in "congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race?"
We shall lose, Lincoln said, "the last best, hope of earth." What did Lincoln mean by that phrase that everybody praises and nobody questions? The "last best hope of earth" was a Union of White people purified and brought together by the deportation of Blacks.
This book ought to be required reading by every University course on the Civil War. It is well-written and researched. My highest recommendation.
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Ms Jacqueline
A book well worth having
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2016
