Incident at an Antique Store

[LincolnToddFan]

What about Benjamin Butler's insistence that AL was still pushing the colonization proposal...right up to within the last 48 hours of his life? (This is documented in the William Harris book "Last Months", but it's near midnight here and I will have to dig it up tomorrow.)

And even if it's true, as some have asserted, that he had largely abandoned his back-to-Africa goal for the freedmen, how were the Confederate leaders-the former masters of these same freed slaves-going to be induced to give ANY of them the right to vote in the post war South? Even the ones AL called "the very intelligent?" These were the same Confederate leaders who-literally almost up to the bitter end-had refused to even allow slaves to enlist as soldiers to fight for their cause even though it conceivably might have turned the tide in their direction.

You say that you disagree that AL intended to set up White man only governments in the post Civil War South...but are you seriously suggesting that any freed slaves were going to be permitted by their former masters to hold public office?

Bennett's argument-which I don't necessarily agree with 100% but does warrant examination imo-is that there was often a disconnect between AL's public rhetoric and private behavior on the issue of race.

Frederick Douglas was indeed an admirer of AL, but his feelings for him almost up to the end of his life were conflicted. He famously stated that AL was a "White man's president" and that Blacks were "at best his step-children".

I have made no secret of my admiration for AL, but the fact is that his views on the race issue could be complicated. They were evolving. Professor Burlingame tends to see and write AL as faultless and heroic in both his private and public lives. I see him as an heroic figure as well, but very far from faultless.