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With enlistments dwindling after costly defeats and popular support for his war nil, Lincoln proposed his abolition scheme which was severely criticized by the British press as simply a plan to incite race war. The British were familiar with this secret weapon as Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, proclaimed his own emancipation decree in 1775 after which slaves flocked to his standard to fight against American independence. It was used by the British once again in 1814 as Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane issued another emancipation proclamation to incite violent slave insurrection to destroy the United States from within.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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Mr. Lincoln Incites Race War:
London Times, October 7, 1862:
“It is rarely that a man can be found to balance accurately mischief to another against advantage to himself. President Lincoln is, as the world says, a good-tempered man, neither better nor worse than the mass of his kind – neither a fool nor sage, neither a villain nor a saint, but a piece of that common useful clay out of which it delights the American democracy to make great Republican personages.
Yet President Lincoln has declared that from the 1st of January next to come every State that is in rebellion shall be, in the eye of Mr. Lincoln, a Free State. After that date Mr. Lincoln proposes to enact that every slave in a rebel State shall be for ever after free, and he promises that neither he, nor his army, nor his navy will do anything to repress any efforts which the Negroes in such rebel States may make for the recovery of their freedom.
This means, of course, that Mr. Lincoln will, on the 1st of January, do his best to excite a servile war in the States which he cannot occupy with his arms. He will run up the rivers in his gunboats; he will seek out the places which are left but slightly guarded, and where the women and children have been trusted to the fidelity of coloured domestics. He will appeal to the black blood of the African, he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when the blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet. This is what Mr. Lincoln avows before the world that he is about to do.
Now, we are in Europe thoroughly convinced that the death of slavery must follow as necessarily upon the success of the Confederates in this war as the dispersion of darkness occurs upon the rising of the sun; but sudden and forcible emancipation resulting from “the efforts the Negroes may make for their actual freedom” can only be effected by massacre and utter destruction.
Mr. Lincoln avows, therefore, that he proposes to excite the Negroes of the Southern plantations to murder the families of their masters while these are engaged in the war. The conception of such a crime is horrible. The employment of Indians sinks to a level with civilized warfare in comparison with it; the most detestable doctrines of Mazzini are almost less atrocious; even Mr. Lincoln’s own recent achievements of burning by gunboats the defenceless villages on the Mississippi are dwarfed by this gigantic wickedness.
The single thing to be said for it is that it is a wickedness that holds its head high and scorns hypocrisy. It does not even pretend to attack slavery as slavery. It launches this threat of a servile rebellion as a means of war against certain States, and accompanies it with a declaration of general protection to all other slavery.
Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the Negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves. “Come to me,” he cries to the insurgent planters, “and I will preserve your rights as slaveholders; but set me still at defiance, and I will wrap myself in virtue, and take the sword of freedom in my hand, and, instead of aiding you to oppress, I will champion the rights of humanity. Here are the whips for you who are loyal; go forth and flog or sell your black chattels as you please. Here are torches and knives for employment against you who are disloyal.
Little Delaware, with her 2000 slaves, shall still be protected in her loyal tyranny. Maryland, with her 90,000 slaves, shall “freely accept or freely reject” any project for either gradual or immediate abolition; but if Mississippi and South Carolina, where the slaves rather outnumber the masters, do not repent, and receive from Mr. Lincoln a licence to trade in human flesh, that human flesh shall be adopted by Mr. Lincoln as the agent of his vengeance.
Mr. Lincoln, by this proclamation, constitutes himself a sort of moral American Pope. He claims to sell indulgences to own votaries, and he offers them with full hands to all who will fall down and worship him. It is his to bind, and it is his to loose. His decree of emancipation is to go into remote States, where his temporal power cannot be made manifest, and where no stars and stripes are to be seen; and in those distant swamps he is, by sort of Yankee excommunication, to lay the hand under a slavery interdict…”
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Mr. Lincoln Incites Race War
