ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(1809-1865)

WHY DID ABRAHAM LINCOLN FREE THE SLAVES?

8-9-03 - DREAM - I was in a large house with some other people. I saw an egg-shaped container with the pictures of some beautiful colored fish on it, like Brook Trout and Sunfish, etc. Each fish had  number under it like a zip-code - One number I recall was 56019. The other numbers were similar. I was shown that these same images were to be moved to a square box which would be sold to people in stores. It was important to move the images from the egg to the box and keep them in the same order, so I was helping to make certain they were. I turned the egg around then to see what was on the far side and to my surprise, it was the image of a tall, thin, old black man with white hair, dressed in clothing like a slave. I looked at the image closer and it became animated and spoke to me. The image said, "Abraham was my grandson!" All I can say is, "What?"

Abraham Lincoln's ancestors spelled their name "Linkhern" and other "Linkorn", but Abraham Lincoln, the grandparent and his wife Bathsheba signed their name "Lincoln" before selling their farm and leaving Virginia with their five children in the early 1780's to make their way west down the Wilderness Road, following the trail the buffalo took, through mountain gaps, past Indians on the ambush to the rich timber and bluegrass farmlands of Kentucky. In Kentucky, they staked claims for 2,000 acres, a modest size as far as plantations went, but stretching almost as far as the eye could see, paying a total price of $800. The dream did not last long. An Indian sneaked through the woods and put a fatal shot into abraham while he was clearing a field. His son Thomas watched in horror and would have been carried off if his older brother Mordecai had not taken aim from the nearest cabin and shot the killer dead. The pioneer family was stricken forlorn and leaderless and eventually, they were forced to scatter about the country. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln's father hired himself out for many types of jobs, helped to build a milldam, cut wood, learned carpentry and cabinetmaking, bought a horse, guarded prisoners, enlisted to fight Indians, patrolled for permitless slaves, eventually saving enough money to buy a piece of land and established a home for his mother. At the age of 28, he married a girl his younger sisters had played with as a child. Her name was Nancy Hanks. Nancy was a tall, pretty, uneducated 23 year old, with sad, gray eyes. It was whispered that she was an 'illegitimate' child, her mother never having been married. The Lincoln's first child was named Sarah, born in 1807. They decided to move to the country to farm in 1808. They lived in a hand-hewn log cabin 18 feet long, standing on the south fork of Nolin Creek. They called their place "Sinking Springs Farm". Their little cabin had only one window and a door with leather hinges. On Feb. 12, 1809, soon after dawn, little Abraham was born on a bed made of poles, cornhusks and bearskins. Nancy Hanks--the mother of Abraham Lincoln--continues to be a topic of debate when it comes to her ancestry, especially her own parentage. Was she illegitimate? Hanks family genealogists offer differing opinions on that subject. Now comes a theory that Abraham Lincoln himself was illegitimate. R. Vincent Enloe’s controversial claim is that Abraham Lincoln was the illegitimate offspring of Nancy Hanks by an affair with a North Carolinian named Abraham Enloe. This theory is discussed in detail in R. Vincent Enloe’s article, "The Abraham Lincoln Genesis cover-up," on the website GenealogyToday.com. The writer says that Abraham Lincoln’s lanky build mirrored that of Wesley Enloe, a man he believes was the President’s half-brother. Mr. Enlow claims: Abraham Lincoln was probably about six years older than his faked birth date of Feb. 12, 1809, and no more resembled Thomas Lincoln than his true half-brother, Wesley Enloe, who shares the same ultra-lanky frame inherited from their father (see a photo comparison). Mr. Enlow details, side by side, the North Carolina and Kentucky traditions, one backed by a wealth of evidence, the other based on assumptions complete with unexplained gaps of time and frequent admissions of unexplainability. He says that a glorified story has been substituted for Abraham Lincoln's true genealogy, his mother's illegitimacy, his turbulent life, his grandmother's promiscuity, his actual  place of birth, and even his accurate age.  Enloe's story His cousin Dennis Hanks told the tale of little Abraham's childhood, called him a 'red cherry pulp' baby, never was good looking as a child, and grew so fast, his mother couldn't sew his clothes fast enough before he had already outgrown them. He was said to sit on a stool and stare at people, and then burst out laughing uproariously and the visitors couldn't figure out what was so funny. He was barefoot most of the time as a child, and soon after he was weaned, he could be found out in the woods, fishing in the creek, setting traps for rabbits and muskrats, going on Coon hunts with his older cousins. Daniel Boone was one of their distant kinsman.

It is common knowledge that he was born in a dirt-floored log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, and you can visit all sorts of log cabins that people claim to be it. Actually, the real one doesn't exist anymore. It was completely destroyed by fire in about 1840. Also, although his family was poor, everybody in the neighborhood was poor. His family was relatively well off, they were actually in the top 15% income bracket for their county.

Although it was true that Lincoln only attended school for one year, he was an avid over-achiever who taught himself how to read and write, then read everything he could lay his hands on. He was driven to educate himself.

Lincoln was hard working, and didn't get much in pay. His father hired him out to split fence rails for a neighbor, Mrs. Miller. She couldn't pay him in money, but instead, paid him with cloth for trousers. Every four hundred rails earned him a yard of cloth for his jeans. That's how he got the nickname of "The Rail Splitter."

Denton Offutt hired Lincoln to help work in his store when they returned from New Orleans and this was where Lincoln got his second nick-name. A man overpaid Lincoln four cents and was gone before Lincoln noticed the mistake. Before Lincoln went home that night he walked four miles to give the man back his four cents. Things like that eventually earned him the nickname of "Honest Abe," a nick-name he hated. He hated the name "Abe." Nobody who knew him called him Abe! In fact, his future wife Mary Todd always called him "Mr. Lincoln" or "Father." When writing to his friends, he signed his name "A. Lincoln." Interestingly enough, Lincoln's honesty didn't help Offutt, his store went bankrupt within a year of hiring Lincoln.

The Lincolns lost two of their sons during the Civil War, and it is true that Mary Todd held seances in the White House to try to talk to her dead children, and Lincoln himself reportedly attended at least a few of them. This is not surprising, because Lincoln was very superstitious. He once saw two images of himself in an old mirror. He interpreted that mean that he would be elected to a second term as President, but would not live to complete it.

The story that Lincoln had to sneak into Washington for his first inaugural address because of assassination rumors is also true, but he was only smuggled into Washington on a sleeper train under a false name. The stories of him being disguised as a Scotsman complete with plaid cap and kilts, or wearing dark glasses and armed with brass knuckles were all made up by newsmen angry because his plans where kept secret from them. Lincoln was not a popular man, especially among much of the pro-slavery press.

John Wilkes Booth was not the first person to try and kill Abraham Lincoln. Twice before he had been shot at. In 1861, while riding alone at night, the President had been shot at by a man standing 40 yards from him. In 1864 he was shot at and the bullet passed through his stovepipe hat. In both cases, Lincoln joked about it and ordered that it not be publicized.

In the Civil War, the Union lost 364,511 men against the South's 133,821 dead; in other words, the North lost almost three times the men the South did!

Did Abraham Lincoln own slaves?

It seems unlikely because Lincoln was not very wealthy, and was a constant traveler. However, many of our "founding fathers" whom were against slavery owned slaves themselves. Though not really seen as one of the country's original founding fathers, Abe Lincoln did help shape the nation into what it is today.

Lincoln actually lived in a 'free' state.

However, Mary Lincoln's family once owned slaves and her brothers fought for the Confederacy. During the Civil War, some in North considered her a security risk because of that.

Lincoln said:  "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I ... am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position."

That rather sounds like a white supremacist.

He also said, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.."

His intentions of fighting the South did NOT lie with abolishing slavery, but to save the Union. Even though Lincoln died in April of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery was not instituted until eight months later, nearly three years from his "slave freeing" Emancipation Proclamation.

Another Lincoln quote was, "Your race suffers greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated." - quoted from John Hope Franklin's book, "From Slavery to Freedom"

Lincoln was raised by a Baptist family with anti-slavery convictions. Part of the reason why they left Kentucky to move to Indian was to get away from the ugly presence of slavery.

So Lincoln had little experience with black people. There was terrible problems of slave unrest and white violence in older states like South Carolina and Virginia where slaves had been bought and sold for generations. In Illinois the problem was ignorance and prejudice. Along  with his neighbors, Lincoln believed that Negroes were probably inferior to white people. He didn't believe they had the mental capacity to hold the same rights as white people like voting or serving on juries.  As a  result of his beliefs, he called grown adult black men  'boys', and told stories about "pickanninnies", "Sambos", "darkies", and "niggers".

It wasn't until he was 19 that he traveled out of Illinois and experienced slavery markets in other states. On his trip he and his partner were attacked by seven negroes and had to fight them off.  It wasn't until he was 28 that he finally spoke out publically against slave markets. However, on another one of his trips out of the state, he saw "12 negroes' chained together, who were enjoying themselves, joking amongst themselves and having a good time. He commented later that they were the happiest creatures on board the ship and it was a blessing that God didn't give them the awareness of their plight. Most southerners believed that the slaves had a good life as 'they were a child race' as Jefferson Davis was quoted to have said.

Lincoln was elected to Congress in the late 1840's and introduced an anti-slavery bill which would have abolished slavery in Washington, DC, but it failed to pass.  He was quoted to say, "This is a world of compensation. and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave."

In 1846, a slave by the name of Dred Scott sued for his freedom, based on the fact that his owner had moved to a 'free state'. The case ended up in the Supreme Count in 1857. The Court itself was dominated by a former slave owner Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. He reaffirmed that Negroes were 'beings of an inferior order ...and altogether unfit to associate with the white race." Therefore, wrote the court, 'blacks were not, and never had been citizens of this country and thus had no right to sue."

This set Abraham Lincoln to feelings of disgust and Lincoln argued that free blacks in five free states had been full voting citizens at the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Lincoln wrote, "In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all, but now to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and  sneered at, and construed, and squawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it."

On June 19, 1862, after Lincoln became President, he signed into law a measure that prohibited slavery in the unorganized territories of the U.S., thereby defusing the issue that had inflamed the nation throughout the 1850's. On July 17th, he signed into law a bill that amended a bill passed in August 1861, which freed slaves who were directly involved in the Confederate War - the new law added 'confiscation' to the human property of any slave owner in Union-occupied territory who had actively supported the rebellion. On July22, he read the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, which would free all slaves in areas still in rebellion on January 1, 1863.

During the summer of 1862, Lincoln met with Secretaries Seward and Welles.Seward urged caution with pressing forward with the plan for the Proclamation of Emancipation, thinking it was best to wait for a military victory in the war before moving forward with it. Lincoln reluctantly agreed. The thing that the whites feared most was free blacks "swarming northward" and "intermingling" and taking their jobs. Lincoln  long advocated black 'emigration' for freed blacks to be willingly colonized to places like Liberia, Haiti, or Central America. Henry Clay, whom Lincoln admired greatly had advocated the same and Lincoln believed that blacks would be eager to return to the lands from which their ancestors had been stolen, or, at the very least, to make their escape out of white colonization be "voluntary and without expense" to the emigres. Lincoln felt that if he could convince even a small number of them to go, it would help him immensely to accomplish the political miracle of emancipation.

On August 14th, he addressed a delegation of free Negroes, invited to the White House to hear his ideas.

Admitting that American blacks were "suffering ... the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," and that white racism was an unalterable "fact" that would pursue blacks throughout time, Lincoln proceeded to blame America's current problems on the black presence, "Our white men (are) cutting one another's throats ... (and) but for your race among us there could not be war ... It is better for us broth, therefore, to be separated."

By the President of the United States of America: A PROCLAMATION Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: "That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. "That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States." Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued. And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages. And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

EXAMPLE OF LINCOLN'S HANDWRITING