The tall tales told by
the Lincoln cult get funnier and funnier as more and more Americans learn the
truth about their own history (as opposed to the version fed to them by the
Lincoln cult). This time the source of their knee-slapping whoppers is
a hilarious attempt to cover up the fact that their hero apparently read and
studied a white supremacist screed.
A recent article that
appeared in the Huffington Post, FOX news online, the Daily Mail,
and elsewhere described how Lincoln’s handwriting had been verified by
handwriting experts in an 1854 book entitled Types of Mankind.
According to these news articles, the book argued that the different races
developed at different times, and were therefore not susceptible to
co-existing or amalgamation. “The book was used by nineteenth-century
white supremacists!,” screamed the articles.
What on earth was Abraham
Lincoln, “Father Abraham,” the eternal friend and savior of the black race,
doing with such a book?! The Lincoln cult quickly swung into action
creating an alibi. The news articles all reported that “Illinois state
historians” all “took great pains to offer reassurance that the former
president who ended slavery didn’t subscribe to the theories at hand” in the
book. No facts were offered, only painful “reassurances” by these
state-funded “historians.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling
especially reassured.
Even one or two of the Lincoln cult’s Big Guns were un-cobwebbed to
participate in broadcasting the alibi. James Cornelius, the curator of
the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois,
“reassured” the media that Lincoln “could foresee the whole country coming
apart over the issue that different people could be barred from different
things” because of their race. He therefore would never have believed
the things in that book, said the curator.
James Cornelius and the Illinois state historians are full of it and they
know it. These are people who have spent their entire careers reading
and cataloguing Abe Lincoln’s political speeches. They surely must know
that Lincoln’s views and, more importantly, his actions as a state
legislator, a one-term congressman, a political candidate, and as president,
are totally consistent with this and any other white supremacist book of that
era. Consider the following public statements of Lincoln himself from
his own Collected Works (CW):
“Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My
own feelings will not admit of them” (CW, Vol. II, p. 256). This
statement alone refutes all that the James Cornelius and the Illinois state
historians “reassured” the media.
“What I would most desire,” Abraham Lincoln also declared, “would be the
separation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p.
521). And, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social
equality between the white and black races . . . . I am in favor of the
race to which I belong, having the superior position” (CW, Vol. III,
p. 16).
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of
Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold [political] office, nor to intermarry
with white people,” said the political idol of the Marc Levins, Harry Jaffas,
Rich Lowrys, Rush Limbaughs, and all other Lincoln-worshipping neocons (not
to mention the Leftist/Marxist Lincoln worshippers like Eric Foner and 99% of
the academic history profession).
“Senator Douglas remarked . . . that . . . this government was made
for white people and not for negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I
think so too,” said Abe (CW, Vol. II, p. 281).
As Philip Magness and Sabastian Page showed in their excellent book, Colonization
After Emancipation, Lincoln worked diligently all
his life, up to his dying days, on the
project of deporting all the black people out of America. As a young
man he was a “manager” of the Illinois Colonization Society, which used tax
dollars to deport the small number of free blacks who resided in
Illinois. As president, he allocated millions of dollars to a project
that would “colonize” American blacks in Liberia. In 1862 he held a
meeting with several dozen free black men in the White House at which he
explained to them that, because of the inherent differences between the white
and black races, they could never live together, and so he urged them to lead
by example and colonize themselves in Liberia. In what sounds like it
could have been taken directly from the pages of Types of Mankind,
Lincoln informed the black men that “You and we are different races. We
have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two
races . . . . This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us
both,” and “affords a reason at least why we should be separated . . .
. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate” (Abraham
Lincoln, “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men,” August 14,
1862, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, Vol. 2, 1859-1866
(New York: Library of America, 1989), p. 354.
Lincoln supported the Illinois Constitution that prohibited the emigration
of black people into the state, and also supported the Illinois Black Codes
that stripped the small number of free blacks in the state of any semblance
of citizenship. Once again, his actions were consistent with his words
on the subject of race.
It is impossible to believe that James Cornelius and the Illinois state
historians are unaware of all these plain historical facts. Not to
mention Lincoln’s statements like these: “I have said that the
separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation [of
the races]. Such separation . . . must be effected by colonization” (CW,
Vol. II, p. 409). Or, “It is morally right, and favorable to our
interest, to transfer the African to his native clime” (CW Vol. II, p. 409).
What all of this proves is that, contrary to the Lincoln cult’s
“reassurances,” Lincoln’s views and actions on the subject of race were
perfectly consistent with the 1854 white supremacist book, Types of
Mankind. It was not just a book that he read to prepare for court
on behalf of one of his legal clients, as the Lincoln cult ludicrously and
without any evidence or argument, asserts.
Like all presidential museums, the Lincoln museum in Springfield, Illinois
should be thought of as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Cover-Up
Library and Museum. It may well provide accurate information about
Abe’s childhood, his family history, his eating habits, shoe size, hats that
he wore, etc., etc., but when it comes to the big, important issues, it is
devoted to spreading untruths about American history while sweeping much of
real history under the rug.
