Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The Limits of Lincoln Bashing Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_limits_of_lincoln_bashing#24442 Post contents: Sid deserves the "Stalin Prize" for revisionist history, unless his hero Tommy Di has won it first. Anyway, finally there is a partial admission that slavery was more important than tariffs as a cause to the Civil War. Yes, slavery in the "territories" was the issue. As Harry Jaffa has shown, Lincoln knew that the planters' aristocracy wanted expansionism, into the W. territories and Central America. Had the South seceded, it is likely that there would have been war over the slavery expansion issue (esp. if the North refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law). As for the paleo-leftist complaint that Lincoln was a racist who opposed racial equality, well, he and 99.9% of all other Americans (including Yanks) fit this bill in 1861. Had Abe come across as Dr. King in 1861, he would have gone down to electoral defeat anywhere in the US. Even a few abolitionists (and most Yanks) supported colonization after emancipation. Sorry Sid, but Lincoln wasn't alone in this regard. (By the way, are you really a rightist? You sound like the kind of New Left historian whom Tommy Di praises.) Sent at: 2008 07 06