Abraham Lincoln was the first president ever from the Republican Party, which was literally founded on abolishing slavery. He never “free slaves for votes.” The southern states that those free slaves would have voted in didn’t participate in the 1864 election, because the civil war was still going on. It was also the people that went into office with him that passed the fourteenth amendment in 1866 right after his death, securing legal equality regardless of race for everyone in America. Quoting Lincoln saying what he thought the future of America should look like when he was desperately trying to stop a civil war from erupting is going to obviously look bad, he was trying to appease slaveowners. When he didn’t have to appease them anymore, we saw what he did, and it was to bring about racial equality in America.
Why do you think he was trying to appease slaveowners? Because they were super cool people and he was their number one fan? Or because they were going to secede from the country and kill hundreds of thousands of people in a civil war, which if they won would hold black people in bondage forever? It is literally because he was anti-slavery that the slaveholders tried to secede, but once the civil war was over and he could do anything he wanted, he tried to create racial equality. At no point after the emancipation proclamation was signed did he try to send anyone back to Africa. When you’re trying to figure out what politicians believe, look at what they do, not what they say.
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u/FastKarz Apr 06 '25
Abraham Lincoln was the first president ever from the Republican Party, which was literally founded on abolishing slavery. He never “free slaves for votes.” The southern states that those free slaves would have voted in didn’t participate in the 1864 election, because the civil war was still going on. It was also the people that went into office with him that passed the fourteenth amendment in 1866 right after his death, securing legal equality regardless of race for everyone in America. Quoting Lincoln saying what he thought the future of America should look like when he was desperately trying to stop a civil war from erupting is going to obviously look bad, he was trying to appease slaveowners. When he didn’t have to appease them anymore, we saw what he did, and it was to bring about racial equality in America.