Did Lincoln REALLY Free The Slaves? - Excerpt

Ebony, Feb, 2000 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Who freed these slaves?

To the extent that they were ever "freed," they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of the fifty-six years of his life. The best witness once again is Abraham Lincoln who said shortly before his death that "he never would have done it, if he had not been compelled by necessity to do it, to maintain the union."

Every Lincoln scholar knows this.

Yet most scholars continue to say that Lincoln freed the slaves, violating history and the plain language of the document which everybody praises and nobody reads.

Lincoln didn't free the slaves. If it had been left up to him, Blacks would have remained in slavery to 1900 or even longer. In a September 1858 speech, he said, "I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction [of slavery] would occur in less than a hundred years at the least," which would have pushed emancipation to September 1958 "at least," twenty-nine years after the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. and four years after Brown v. Board of Education. If Lincoln had had his way, Oprah Winfrey, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Lena Horne, Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens, Louis Armstrong, W. C. Handy, Hank Aaron, Maya Angelou, Debbie Allen, Benjamin Quarles, Josephine Baker, Mary MeLeod Bethune, Ralph Bunehe, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Leontyne Price, Bessie Smith, Walter White, Madame C. J. Walker, Maxine Waters, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Richard Wright, Alex Haley, and even Clarence Thomas would have been born in slavery.

"If I had had my way," Lincoln told a petitioner in October 1862, "this war would never have been commenced; if I had been allowed my way this war would have ended before this...."

Before what? Before the blunders of the Lincoln administration and the intransigence of Confederates forced him to stretch out his hand to Ethiopia.

Lincoln didn't change.

If he had had his way, millions of 20th-century Whites would have been in Gone With The Wind instead of watching it.

Must we say then that the Proclamation was nothing? By no means. This would be to make the same mistake as people who say it was everything. In fact, as we shall see, it was one link, and only one link, in the chain of emancipation. Lincoln was at best an incidental factor in that process, for he did everything he could to avoid the end that immortalized him. Even if it turns out that the Proclamation advanced the process, he didn't plan it that way. What he planned, in fact, was the precise opposite of what happened. And if he had been told "when he entered on the Presidency," Hume said, "that before his term of office would expire, he would be hailed as `The Great Emancipator,' he would have treated the statement as equal to one of his own best jokes" (143).