Lincoln And Emancipation
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Lincoln And Emancipation
He comes to us in the mists of legend as a kind of homespun Socrates,
brimming with prarie wit and folk wisdom. There is a counterlegend of Lincoln,
one shared ironically enough by many white Southerners and certain black
Americans of our time. Neither of these views, of course, reveals much about the
man who really lived--legend and political interpretations seldom do. As a man,
Lincoln was complex, many-sided, and richly human. He was an intense, brooding
person, he was plagued with chronic depression most of his life. At the time he
even doubted his ability to please or even care about his wife. Lincoln remained
a moody, melancholy man, given to long introspection about things like death and
mortality. Preoccupied with death, he was also afraid to insanity. Lincoln was a
teetotaler because liquor left him “flabby and undone”, blurring his mind
and threatening his self-control. One side of Lincoln was always Supremely
logical and analytical, he was intrigued by the clarity of mathematics. As a
self-made man, Lincoln felt embarrassed about his log-cabin origins and never
liked to talk about them. By the 1850s, Lincoln was one of the most sought after
attorney in Illinois, with a reputation as a lawyer’s lawyer. Though a man of
status and influence, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in legend.
Politically, Lincoln was always a nationalist in outlook , an outlook that began
when he was an Indiana farm boy tilling his farther mundane wheat field. Lincoln
always maintained that he had always hated human bondage, as much as any
abolitionist. He realized how wrong it was that slavery should exist at all in a
self-proclaimed free Republic. He opposed slavery, too, because he had witnessed
some of it’s evils firsthand. What could be done? So went Lincoln’s argument
before 1854. To solve the ensuing problem of racial adjustment, Lincoln insisted
that the federal government should colonize all blacks in Africa, an idea he got
from his political idol, Whig national leader Henry Clay. Then came 1854 and the
momentous Kansas-Nebraska Act , brainchild of Lincoln’s archrival Stephen A.
Douglas. At once a storm of free-soil protest broke across the North, and scores
of political leaders branded the Kansas-Nebraska Act as part of a sinister
Southern plot to extend slavery and augment Southern political power in
Washington. The train of ominous events from Kansas-Nebraska to Dred Scott shook
Lincoln to his foundations. Lincoln waded into the m...
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