His Yankee competition's poster
He knows this man personally (the Guys real name is Missouri Sape). They were in the same Paris bakery suffering the same apprenticeship program. Hate is deep and tossed back and forth between both men.
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Who really freed the slaves?
ReplyDeleteLincoln did issue the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of 1863, which on paper freed slaves in the states of the Confederacy that had seceded from the United States. But it took a fighting force of 2 million soldiers in the Union Army to bring the Confederacy to its knees
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THE CIVIL War was the result of an irreconcilable conflict between two social systems--slavery in the South and free wage labor in the North.
Lincoln campaigned for president in 1860 as an opponent of slavery's expansion into the new territories in the Western U.S. Although morally opposed to slavery, he was not ready to immediately deprive slave owners of their property "rights" where slavery already existed.
Instead, Lincoln proposed colonization as the solution to the "Negro problem." The government would gradually purchase the freedom of slaves and then send them to Liberia in Africa, removing them from American society.
This idea satisfied neither slave masters nor the abolitionists. The former slave Frederick Douglass, a supporter of Lincoln's Republican Party, skewered the colonization plan. "Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy," Douglass said.
Meanwhile, the Southern slaveocracy opposed any attempt to gradually eliminate slavery, or even to check its expansion into the new territories of the West. Slave labor had made the small class of Southern rulers rich. To survive, they needed new lands for their plantation system, and new slave states to retain their political dominance in the federal government.
A string of Confederate victories in the early battles of the Civil War forced a reconsideration of this policy. Numerically, slaves comprised nearly half of the secessionist states' already much smaller population. Should they defect to the North, the rebel states' strength would be sapped.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was limited to freeing only slaves in states that had seceded--slave masters in the border states that had remained officially neutral were exempt, as were any parts of the Confederacy already under Union control. Still, the document was a recognition that the goals of a Union victory to keep the United States together and the destruction of slavery were tied together and inseparable. Since the proclamation could only apply in reality if the North won the war, the Northern army became a de facto army of liberation--with slaves escaping to Union lines to gain their freedom.
Black troops fought in nearly every major campaign
Blacks also played a crucial role in the war effort from behind Southern lines--engaging in sabotage, strikes, individual acts of violence, conspiracy, rebellion and marronage (forming illegal communities.) These slave disturbances drained Confederate resources, with militia and army units forced to patrol at home rather than fight the Union Army.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis' own slaves eavesdropped on his meetings--and passed information to Union agents, who were often Black women.
One of the more brazen acts of resistance came on the morning of May 13, 1862. Robert Smalls and a crew of seven other slaves snuck aboard the Confederate ship Planter with their families and piloted it over to Union lines. Smalls joined the Union Navy--and later became a five-term member of Congress from South Carolina during the short-lived Reconstruction era.
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THE UNION victory led to the abolition of slavery and the most dramatic redistribution of wealth in U.S. history--probably in the history of the world. It made citizens of African Americans and enfranchised Blacks males, who during the period of Reconstruction, when the South was under military control, elected Blacks to numerous political positions, including U.S. Senate.