Mr. Lee

[J. Beckert]

(04-18-2014 07:50 PM)Linda Anderson Wrote:  I don't understand that, Joe. When was Lincoln supposed to prepare them for freedom by affording them a very basic education? In the midst of that terrible war? Who knows what plans Lincoln had for his second term. Booth put an end to that.

And maybe most slaves would rather "root, hog, or die" than to spend one more day as a slave.

That's my point, Linda. Before sacrificing 600,000 lives, Lincoln had no plans to prepare them for anything but a freedom that cost that many American lives. We can't say "He might have" when Lee's words show he understood the slavery issue far better than Lincoln did five years before the war came. Lincoln's last thoughts were to give "the very intelligent" the right to vote. He had no plans to integrate them into our society as Lee had. The Abolitionist movement had a full head of steam in the 1850's. Most of it was fueled by emotion. A worst case scenario (and embarrassing for the country) would have been that slavery would have eventually died by becoming cost prohibitive due to industrial progress and ended that way. It was dying one way or another. I like Lee's ideas better.

Earlier in the thread, a few good examples of how free slaves "enjoyed" their new freedom prove that the melodramatic notions that slaves were whipped all day and raped all night are creations by those who attatch themselves emotionally to this issue and lose sight of the realities of the plight the freed slave faced with being unequipped to be released in a hostile country where true equality is still being debated 150 years later.