[WhiskeyPapa]

An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run.

And resistance to the rebellion would have collapsed the same day.

Even after three years of war Lincoln said that giving up the support of the blacks would cause the loss of the war within three weeks.

Part of Lincoln's genius was in knowing what the country would accept, and another part was helping to guide it where it needed to go.

Walt

[TheDon]

The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

I find this argument laughable coming from the slave holding states.

Hi Walt, looks like these idiots haven't given up yet!

[Alabama_Wild_Man]

We can actually thank(?) Robert Dale Owen for that Proclamation.

Heck, he even helped screw up the American Public School system . . .

[H.Akston]

"Part of Lincoln's genius was in knowing what the country would accept, and another part was helping to guide it where it needed to go.

Walt"

Careful there walt. "Where it needed to go" tells me that he wasn't interested in "saving", but in "creating" something new. All you Lincoln-lovers insist that he saved what was. That, as you nearly let slip that you know, is balderdash.

The nation we live in now, structurally, is quite different from the one most of you Lincoln-lovers credit him with saving. Most of the problems we have now - with empire building and judicial activism, are a result of living in that structure which fosters less justice than the ones the Founders created.

The Yankees couldn't handle a true Republic, with consent- of-the-governed as a principle in its fabric. I will give Lincoln the benefit of the doubt though, becuase he didn't guide the Nation after the war, when these destabilizations really took place.

Had he lived during Reconstruction, he indicated in his words prior to and during the war that he'd have preserved more of the just, original structure than we have now. For example, I don't think Lincoln would have allowed the 14th Amendment to have been 'ratified', and I use that word generously.

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38ae1fc86628.htm

Lincoln didn't "guide the Nation" when it was most malleable. Radicals did. Lincoln was killed by a madman from Maryland, a week after Lee had surrendered.

It's the radicals, Walt. Be they republicans, abolitionists, abortionists, anti-abortionists, populists, Lincoln-lovers, egalitarians, or Islamic whackos. Radicals are the danger. Their excesses open the door for exploitation, e.g., affirmative action, and busing.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

The problem is that people assume that if you are anti-slavery that you are also an abolitionist.  In actual fact, most northerners prior to the Civil War were Unionists and held slavers in contempt and abolitionists is suspicion.

Lincoln was a Unionist.