What wasn't decent about his predecessors?
shareMost of them were slave-owners.
shareBut Lincoln never freed any slaves. Remember the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states that had already left the Union. The remaining states and territories were free to allow or abolish slavery as they saw fit. In short he didn't give a shit about slavery and if you go read transcripts of his campaign speeches when he was running for President he flip flopped on the issue of slavery depending on where he was speaking. In a pro slave state he would talk about how it wasn't a problem and was good for the negro... in a anti-slave state he would say just the opposite. So sorry he wasn't a good President just a lying sack of shit like so many others, he only managed to say such things because the information traveled so poorly back then that people didn't get a chance to compare what he said in their state with what he had said in another.
shareHow do we define decent?
shareNo.
Abraham Lincoln, "the great emancipator", allowed his generals to commit atrocities against Native American communities throughout the Civil War, leading to massacres at Sand Creek and Bear River.
i didn't say perfect.
shareOr...
In 1862, the Santee Sioux of Minnesota grew tired of waiting for the 1.4 million dollars they had been promised for the sale of 24 million acres of land to the federal government in 1851. Appeals to President Lincoln fell on deaf ears. What made this even more egregious to the Sioux was the invasion of this yet unpaid for land by thousands of white settlers. Then, with a very poor crop in august of 1862, many of the Indians were hungry and facing starvation with the upcoming winter.
When Lincoln outright refused to pay the owed money, remember he had a war to finance the Indians revolted. Lincoln assigned General John Pope to quell the uprising and he announced at the beginning of his campaign: "It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made." Lincoln certainly did not challenge this statement.
The Indians were quickly defeated in October of 1862 and Pope herded all the Indians, men, women and children, into forts where military trials were immediately convened. None of the Indians tried were given any semblance of a defense. Their trials lasted approximately 10 minutes each. All adult males were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death with the only evidence against them being they had been present during a "war" which they themselves had declared against the government.
The authorities in Minnesota asked Lincoln to order the immediate execution of all 303 males found guilty. Lincoln was concerned with how this would play with the Europeans, whom he was afraid were about to enter the war on the side of the South. He offered the following compromise to the politicians of Minnesota: They would pare the list of those to be hung down to 39. In return, Lincoln promised to kill or
... remove every Indian from the state and provide Minnesota with 2 million dollars in federal funds. Remember, he only owed the Sioux 1.4 million for the land.
So, on December 26, 1862, the Great Emancipator ordered the largest mass execution in American History, where the guilt of those to be executed was entirely in doubt. Regardless of how Lincoln defenders seek to play this, it was nothing more than murder to obtain the land of the Santee Sioux and to appease his political cronies in Minnesota.
In short Lincoln was a worthless piece of shit.
Didn't he just want to use blacks as weapons in the war? No history lies About him.
share[deleted]
All of his predecessors were decent.
shareNo, you can't. You can look up his speeches about black people and he wanted them to leave the country because he thought they were useless subhuman defective farm equipment. He was also a tyrant who abused his power worse than any dictator ever did.
shareIf he thought black people "were useless subhuman defective farm equipment" he would have been in favor of slavery. To quote him, "When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition,—he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flatboat—just what might happen to any poor man's son. I want every man to have his chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is the true system."
He did hold that black people were biologically "inferior" to whites, but by the time he was assassinated he had begun to feel that certain segments of the black population ought to be given voting rights. His belief in "solving" the issue by having black Americans emigrate to Africa was also something he abandoned by 1865.