The Emancipation Proclamation Was Primarily A Military And Political Decision


Selene

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I was not sure about whether the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves who were in the States that seceded.

It is a fact.

Lincoln evaluated that this "Executive Order" would:

1) add moral clarity to the meme of the war as freeing the slaves;

2) cause the enslaved Negro to get to our lines for freedom, revenge and to liberate his fellow slaves; and

3) cause the Southern economy to lose it's House Negros and Field Negros.

It was a brilliant political solve.

Some 200,000 Negros served with honor with the Union.

It did deal an additional blow to the Southern economy.

http://www.civilwar.org/150th-anniversary/emancipation-proclamation-150.html

A...

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I was not sure about whether the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves who were in the States that seceded.

It is a fact.

Lincoln evaluated that this "Executive Order" would:

1) add moral clarity to the meme of the war as freeing the slaves;

2) cause the enslaved Negro to get to our lines for freedom, revenge and to liberate his fellow slaves; and

3) cause the Southern economy to lose it's House Negros and Field Negros.

It was a brilliant political solve.

Some 200,000 Negros served with honor with the Union.

It did deal an additional blow to the Southern economy.

http://www.civilwar.org/150th-anniversary/emancipation-proclamation-150.html

A...

The move also would give the British pause in helping the Confederacy. The Brits had abolished slavery in the 1830s It was a good political and diplomatic move.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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The move also would give the British pause in helping the Confederacy. The Brits had abolished slavery in the 1830s It was a good political and diplomatic move.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Good point Bob.

Wow...

Is that the first positive statement about Lincoln that you have made on OL?

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The British could afford the moral high ground. They didn't need to be slave owners themselves so they abolished the trade. That they fed on Southern cotton--well, they wanted that damn stuff so they traded for it. They knew the South didn't need any more slaves anyway; a critical self-sustaining mass had been achieved. The road to the moral high ground was paved with hypocrisy, but it was an inevitable trip. Wash, rinse, dry and go on by getting over it for the past is past. You just do as much of the right thing that you can going forward knowing there's always more shit to deal with. If great-granddad was a slave or slave-owner is not your victimhood or your moral context. It's history. History is for historians and those who don't want to repeat the wrongs that once defined what was going on.

--Brant

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The move also would give the British pause in helping the Confederacy. The Brits had abolished slavery in the 1830s It was a good political and diplomatic move.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Good point Bob.

Wow...

Is that the first positive statement about Lincoln that you have made on OL?

I will make another. Lincoln was one of the most intelligent presidents we have had. He was a proto-fascist but he was whip smart.

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The move also would give the British pause in helping the Confederacy. The Brits had abolished slavery in the 1830s It was a good political and diplomatic move.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Good point Bob.

Wow...

Is that the first positive statement about Lincoln that you have made on OL?

I will make another. Lincoln was one of the most intelligent presidents we have had. He was a proto-fascist but he was whip smart.

Very good. Certainly in the top ten.

Now come, it is the Holidays...

Three times is a charm.

Three Wise men...

Give us one more.

A...

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The moral clarity that the Proclamation provided was the idea that slavery was evil where the Confederacy was in control but not evil in territory held by Union troops.

"The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control. William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, commented, 'We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.' Lincoln was fully aware of the irony, but he did not want to antagonize the slave states loyal to the Union by setting their slaves free." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1549.html

One hundred years later, LBJ's Democratic Congress exercised similar "moral clarity" by making sure that the Voting Rights Act applied only to jurisdictions in the South.

Johnson also was a brilliant politician and tied for 14th with Barack Obama as the best American president.

.

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  • 4 years later...
On 12/20/2014 at 4:53 PM, Francisco Ferrer said:

The moral clarity that the Proclamation provided was the idea that slavery was evil where the Confederacy was in control but not evil in territory held by Union troops.

"The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control. William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, commented, 'We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.' Lincoln was fully aware of the irony, but he did not want to antagonize the slave states loyal to the Union by setting their slaves free." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1549.html

One hundred years later, LBJ's Democratic Congress exercised similar "moral clarity" by making sure that the Voting Rights Act applied only to jurisdictions in the South.

Johnson also was a brilliant politician and tied for 14th with Barack Obama as the best American president.

.

What I first thought was an interesting quip on the net, isn’t. “From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond.” It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, commemorating a dark day in American history, no pun intended.

The specific people this applies to are long dead, but the day those former slaves were freed was their 4th of July and their Independence Day. That makes sense. But is there any other holiday created for just one race? Is this a quibble? After all, even though there were “indentured servants” of all races, only blacks were enslaved. Before Juneteenth blacks were not free . . . in the land of the free. They were not universal citizens. It depended on where they lived in America. But it also reminds me of the false story that the “N” on New Balance shoes stands for the N word. Therefor people wearing New Balance should be assaulted by blacks. For the record, New Balance shoes are for older people with flatter, wider feet, and not just for the athletically inclined. Following is an interesting story. For those who don’t know, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and I agree with Bob. He was very intelligent. Peter

From Yahoo Sports: Former NFL player on reparations: 'How about the Democratic Party pay'

Burgess Owens speaks before Congress. A former NFL player testifying before Congress on Wednesday spoke out against the concept of reparations. Burgess Owens, formerly of the Jets and Raiders, spoke during hearings for H.R. 40, a bill designed to study how to implement reparations for black Americans. The question of what, if anything, America owes to the descendants of slaves is at the heart of H.R. 40, and it’s a question for which Owens, along with a long list of other notable figures, offered an answer.

Speaking for five minutes, Owens noted his own lineage traces directly back to slaves. But, he added, “this is not about black and white, rich or poor, blue collar white collar. We’re fighting for the hearts of our nation.” Owens emphasized that his ancestors battled their way out of their circumstances following emancipation by hard work.

“I do not believe in reparation, because what reparation does, it points to a certain race, a certain color, as evil, and it points to another race, my race, as one that has not only become racist, but also beggars.”

During a portion of his allotted five minutes, Owens took the discussion in specific political directions. “I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found the misery that party brought to my race ... Let's pay restitution. How about the Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race?”

Owens continued, “And every white American, Republican or Democrat, who feels guilty because of the color of their skin, you can pony up also. Then we can get past reparations and recognize this country has given us greatness.”

From  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

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  • 1 year later...

Yuk. We never had extermination camps like the Nazis but we did have slavery plantations. Saturday is Juneteenth. It is horrible to think that America once accepted, to some degree, the institution of slavery, And I welcome another Federal holiday. Do you get to take the day off if you normally work on Saturday? Probably not.

Notes. Juneteenth NOUN a holiday celebrated on June 19 to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the US. The holiday was first celebrated in Texas, where on that date in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War.

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