French students have some questions

[My Name Is Kate]

Like so many other Americans, I once thought of Lincoln as a hero, and probably also like so many other Americans, it was not because I knew alot of facts about him. But after learning more about him and doing some research, I'm not so sure that I think of Lincoln as a hero anymore.

Lincoln's publicly-stated number one goal was the preservation of the Union, which he said could not continue to exist half slave and half free. But another goal that was, for obvious reasons, not stated publicly, was to wrest political power from the South and concentrate it in the hands of the North so Lincoln and the Republicans could further their aim of industrializing the country and strengthening the central government (at the expense of the state governments). The way to do that was to attack slavery because that was how the South maintained their dominant political power in the Federal government. Somewhere further down on Lincoln's list of priorities was a desire to help the slaves for no other reason than that he considered slavery to be immoral and evil.

Lincoln was not willing to compromise in any way on the question of the non-exclusion of slavery in the territories before statehood. He knew that would lead to the South seceding from the Union and would be the beginning of a civil war, but he did not know how long and how hard the South would fight for what they regarded as their constitutional rights, and what was, in fact, their Constitutional right. His unwillingness to compromise was for political reasons and was not rooted in any moral objections to slavery (although he did object to slavery, but that was a side issue with him).

So, the question is, was keeping the Union together, or taking away political power from the South, worth the ultimate price that 618,000+ soldiers paid in order for Lincoln to obtain that goal? Why was it so important to keep the Union together? So the South would continue to be forced to pay high tariffs on their cotton exports, and in that way, provide a large share of the Federal government's revenue? Wouldn't anyone with a genuine abhorrence of slavery regard that money as tainted and not want to get anywhere near it? What other reasons did he have? Would democracy have perished from the earth had the Union not been preserved? Did other countries even think of America as being democratic when it lagged behind many countries in abolishing slavery? Why could democracy not have been preserved in a Union consisting of only free states (as it should have been established after the Revolutionary War), and let the slave states secede and form their own country?

If Lincoln's number one goal had been to rid the country of slavery because slavery is wrong, I would consider him a hero. Why do so many Americans still consider him a hero today? I think one of the major reasons is that all one has to do is mention the word "racism" and people shrink in fear because it is socially taboo nowadays. Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, so anyone who has doubts about his motives or political abilities is viewed with suspicion. Few people are willing to risk being called a racist because witch-hunts are conducted against them on the flimsiest of evidence, or on no evidence at all. Look what happened to George Zimmerman, who is himself part black and half Hispanic, but it's that white half that gets all the attention from the "non-racist" crowd.