Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas

I am procrastinating this morning by reading the 1858 Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates from that year's Illinois senate race:

Fourth Debate : I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.

I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. I recollect of but one distinguished instance that I ever heard of so frequently as to be entirely satisfied of its correctness-and that is the case of Judge Douglas's old friend Col. Richard M. Johnson. [Laughter.]

I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject,) that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]

I will add one further word, which is this: that I do not understand that there is any place where an alteration of the social and political relations of the negro and the white man can be made except in the State Legislature--not in the Congress of the United States--and as I do not really apprehend the approach of any such thing myself, and as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching, I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure. [Uproarious laughter and applause.]

I do not propose dwelling longer at this time on this subject...

Abraham Lincoln, from the first Lincoln-Douglas debate:

First Debate : Now, gentlemen, I don't want to read at any greater length, but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it, and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. [Laughter.]

I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the 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, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects--certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. [Great applause]...

This puts me in mind of ex-slave Frederick Douglass's 1876 judgment of Lincoln:

Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln by Frederick Douglass : Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was... the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.... ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people.... To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government....

[Y]ou, my white fellow-citizens... were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor.... But... despise not the humble offering we this day unveil... for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage.... The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic.... When he tarried long in the mountain; when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defense of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of its inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled. Nor was this, even at that time, a blind and unreasoning superstition. Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position....

[I]t mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States. When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood... we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag....

Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance... the emancipation proclamation....

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race.... His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined...

Comments

[Michael Carroll]

Sad as it is it is imperative you clarify that the Douglas in the Lincoln Douglas Debates is not Fredrick Douglas.

[massacio]

Compare these remarkable speakers with the mumblings from both sides in the Alito hearings and you feel ill. Then think about the differences in the quality of the ideas and the serious consideration given to the ideas, and you cannot see a comparison.

Democracy makes demands on people, and enough of the people who heard Lincoln and Douglass were up to the challenge of self-governance. Our politicians and opinion leaders do not challenge anyone. They want to entertain, not educate, not encourage actual participation.

How many people does it take to make a democracy? When does the number get so small that we just watch our nation curl up and die?

[BillCross]

well they don't spell their last names the same so it shouldn't be too difficult -- Stephen Douglas vs. Frederick Douglass

[Tom]

You call this procrastination?

Playing Nintendo can be procrastination; even posting comments to an economics weblog when you should be working can be procrastination, but reading political debates from 1858 just doesn't cut it.

[anne]

http://www.bartleby.com/114/2.html

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

Of the Dawn of Freedom

THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen's Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?" ...

[Michael Carroll]

Bill Cross,

I'll note my mistake but somehow I think it would still escape a lot of people. I probably should have been more specific myself and named the two as you did.

Massacio,

I think I'll take today over then. Politician's today at least profess a basic commitment to the goal of social equality and not even Lincoln would go that far. It probably is true that the best U.S. politicians of the middle of the 19th century outclass the best politicians of the start of the 21st but I would also tend to think the worst politicians of the middle of the 19th century make Tom Delay look like a choir boy.

[DanG]

You certainly didn't flinch when choosing Lincoln's quotes - his line about not wanting a black woman for his wife was a frequent one he used on the campaign trail (and it always drew a big laugh) and is the most difficult part of his legacy to deal with (that is, by an admirer). The Frederick Douglass speech is simply remarkable. It is deserving of a lot more attention that often the people who are the most put-upon can and often do show greater restraint, understanding and exercise better moral judgement than their oppressors when the tide turns. For one modern example look at South Africa's Truth and Reconcilliation Commission - quite a response to the brutality and ruthlessness with which blacks were treated under Apartheid.

[Brad DeLong]

Re: "You certainly didn't flinch when choosing Lincoln's quotes - his line about not wanting a black woman for his wife was a frequent one he used on the campaign trail (and it always drew a big laugh) and is the most difficult part of his legacy to deal with (that is, by an admirer)."

But there is also "[I]n the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

[Emma Anne]

DanG: "The Frederick Douglass speech is simply remarkable."

It really is. What a gracious and farseeing person he was.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/books/13book.html?ex=1294808400&en=ee5d4d1ba2b74aff&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 13, 2006

King, Weary After Scaling His Great Mountain
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Four decades ago, on March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies brutally attacked a group of civil rights demonstrators who were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., setting upon them with clubs, bullwhips, cattle prods and tear gas. The violent clash, broadcast nationally on television, rocked the country, setting in motion a series of events that would change the political and social landscape of America and send out cultural shock waves that reverberate to this day.

Two weeks later, with federal protection, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would lead a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery - an event that galvanized the nation and provided the momentum for the passage, later that year, of the Voting Rights Act.

Selma, in many respects the high-water mark of the civil rights movement, stands as the narrative anchor of "At Canaan's Edge," the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental history of the life and times of King. As familiar as the epochal Selma showdown may be to readers, it is recounted here with enormous dramatic verve - and a keen understanding of both its historic significance and the ways in which so much that occurred in America in the ensuing years "would be a consequence of, or reaction to" it....

In the weeks and months before his death, King was weary and depressed. Depressed by the lackluster response to his antipoverty drive. Depressed about the war in Vietnam and its implications for the country. Depressed that violence was becoming "a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments." Depressed that the priorities of the civil rights movement were being dissipated by fatigue and infighting and a foreign war.

In the famous speech he gave on the eve of his assassination, however, King put aside his own doubts and fatigue, cast off threats against his own life, and rallied the crowd to the cause he had taken up so many years before - a cause that would see the end of segregation in the South, secure the vote for black citizens and goad the country as a whole, both South and North, into a reconsideration of its prejudices and its past.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now," he said. "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop and I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, and He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight; I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

[Dale]

"I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you"

What a wonderful metaphorical use of scripture. The Bible carries so much meaning in terms of our contemporary struggles for social justice.

And I think most of us are mature enough to understand and appreciate the ambivalencies
in Lincoln's statements.

Finding a correct understanding or interpretation of our social realities is a complex historical process, embeded in the political struggles of our times.

Lincoln helped us progress as a people in this regard. We can see that and we can also see where it was impossible or impolitic for him to see.

[anne]

Dale, nice :)

There is a way that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King used Biblical imagery that speaks at once to the secular and religious.

[JR]

Yes, Lincoln could be jocular and he could pander. But in the same debates he said:

I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man — this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position... Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

And in the same debates he said what is to my mind the most beautiful expression of the promise of America as set out in the Declaration of Independence:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal,—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.
They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all,—constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

[Ken D.]

Lincoln was a man of his times and a fallible human being. He was also a masterful and intensely realistic politician in about the most difficult times imaginable. The savagery of the storms through which he sailed were unfairly deprecated even by so fine an observer as Frederick Douglass, even with the clear view of a mere dozen years or so. Maybe another captain could have produced a better result for the causes and interests Douglass valued. We can never know, but I doubt it very much.

[Brad DeLong]

I think you misread Douglass: Douglass is saying that Lincoln was a lousy abolitionist, but the best possible president...

[anne]

Precisely what Du Bois understood.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E0D71F30F93BA25752C0A96E958260&fta=y

January 18, 1998

Climbing the Mountain
By ALAN WOLFE

Pillar of Fire
America in the King Years, 1963-65.
By Taylor Branch.

To recount the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. is to tell the story of how, more than 50 years after the century began, America finally became a modern society. It did so literally kicking and screaming, when not clubbing and killing. Our century's destiny has been to insure that the ideal of civic equality announced to the world in 1776 would become a reality. Just to help make that come about, King had to overcome the determined resistance of terrorists without conscience, politicians without backbone, rivals without foresight and an F.B.I. director so malicious that he would stop at nothing to destroy a man who believed in justice.

Taylor Branch has been working on Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography for more years than King was active in the movement for civil rights. ''Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63,'' the first volume in what is now planned as a trilogy, was published in 1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize for history. ''At Canaan's Edge,'' the final volume, will appear sometime in the future. For the time being, readers fascinated by the story of King and his country can follow events through 1965 in ''Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65.'' And what events they were. Branch's second volume begins and ends with violence: demonstrations in St. Augustine, Fla., and Selma, Ala. In between, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the United States became deeply involved in Vietnam, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam and paid for it with his life, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began furious lobbying for the even more important Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As he did in ''Parting the Waters,'' Branch brings to these events both a passion for their detail and a recognition of their larger historical significance. By giving King such epic treatment, Branch implies that he was an epic hero. Was he? The great merit of Branch's stunning accomplishment is to prove definitively that he was.

Like Odysseus, King had to break with comforts of home to undergo distant, threatening and often barely comprehensible adventures beyond. As Branch tells the story in the trilogy's opening volume, King was born in 1929 into a world unfamiliar to most white Americans: the black elite of the pre-World War II South. Black Baptist preachers in the former Confederate states, typified by King's father, were usually Republican in their politics and entrepreneurial in their ministries. The younger King fought against his father's insularity all his life. He left the South for the predominantly white Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and then Boston University. When called to the ministry, King rejected the option of eventually becoming his father's successor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in favor of Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Unlike Odysseus, King showed no great desire to return home. Indeed, one measure of his accomplishment was that there was no longer a home to which he could return....

Taylor Branch's treatment of King's life raises no new issues of historical reinterpretation. It uncovers no new documentary evidence. It tells no story that has not been told before. But it does something more important; it reminds us that there once arose in our midst a man who, as Odysseus' son, Telemachus, said of his father, ''more than all other men, was born for pain.'' America was lifted up because King would not lay his burden down. King's tragic sensibility was the direct opposite of today's feel-good therapeutics. ''If freedom is to be a reality,'' he told the 1964 annual convention of the United Synagogues of America, ''the Negro must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice and to work for it.'' For all the tribulations his enemies confronted him with, it is not those who foolishly and vainly stood in his way whom we remember, but Martin Luther King Jr., our century's epic hero.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DF1531F934A15752C1A96E948260

November 27, 1988

How the Dream Was Born
By ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

PARTING THE WATERS
America in the King Years, 1954-63.
By Taylor Branch.

THIS has been a year haunted by another. Nineteen eighty-eight has been a year of reflection in books and articles about 1968, the crescendo of a period marked by profound change. At its center was a nonviolent racial revolution that later met its match in violent street rebellions, burning cities and serial assassinations. In 1968, a decade characterized by a sense of determined mission and often chaotic change came prematurely to a cataclysmic close. It is fitting, then, that 1988 ends with a book that helps explain what happened to us during the formative years, 1954 to 1963, of that period whose shadow we seem unable to escape. We are still trying to understand why the 1960's stubbornly insist on marking the boundary between America before and America after. Rather than a work of interpretive history, ''Parting the Waters,'' the first volume of Taylor Branch's massive social history, is right out of the pages of our lives. It tells the story behind the uprooting of America's tragic racial traditions without which a definitive interpretation of post-World War II America cannot be made.

Although it is subtitled ''America in the King Years,'' the book's scope is less grandiose. Its achievement lies not in a bold definition of the period, but in the success with which it captures the big and little stories of the zenith of the civil rights movement. The contribution of this book is not that it tells us why racial change occurred, but how. It is least successful when it attempts to be more than a history of the movement. Its references to major unrelated events of the period, such as the Hungarian revolt or the Suez crisis, are necessarily disconnected from the stories of the struggle for civil rights and become mere intermissions to the main attraction. Mr. Branch's burden - to cover and bring together the scattered impressions that convey a movement - is awesome enough. Adding to the mix the nuances of the nation's history proved impossible....

From the beginning, the movement had to reinvent itself in new places with new campaigns, new symbols and new sacrifices, even as it tried to achieve a coherent purpose. Always the dialectic of ecstasy and depression within the movement threatened to curtail social change. The nonviolent war imitated the dynamic of the battlefield, with a cruel mixture of false starts, progress, regression, despair, joy and death. The campaigns were staged where battles had been fought in the Civil War 100 years before - in Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama, in ''terrible'' Terrell County and Albany in Georgia, and in McComb and Greenwood in Mississippi.

In the pages on Greenwood, I was pulled back to unforgettable Mississippi days. Mr. Branch had begun to describe my own life. For me, as for many who experienced these years - whether actively involved in the movement or vicariously - ''Parting the Waters'' often brilliantly evokes the familiar. I found many such road markers, but none like the description of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary in Mississippi. It all came rolling back: the summer day I spent in Jackson, Miss., when Evers took me on his ''rounds''; his case for why a law student like me was needed there, an appeal overridden by my promise to Bob Moses to work with him in the Delta; the drive to the bus station that evening, where Evers put me on a bus to Greenwood. I was alone the next morning in the kitchen of a farm couple who were off picking beans when I heard the knock of a child on the screen door. There, sitting naked in a tin washtub of bath water warmed on the stove, I learned that Evers had been shot to death that same night.

Such unforgettable personal memories inevitably will be revived by the stories Mr. Branch tells, but for many they will compete with the book's revelations. Some will be drawn by the occasional stories of intrigue in high places - the Faustian pact between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover allowing wiretaps on King was bought in exchange for secrecy about President Kennedy's affair with an East German woman (hurriedly deported), among others. Yet these few pages pale in significance, and even adventure, to the stories about the movement.

Above all, this is a work of special commitment. Mr. Branch's background is in journalism, not history. Yet even without the scholar's incentives, he has penetrated unusually difficult territory, where records are not kept and the story must be laboriously pieced together. He has done so with great skill and often with language literary in its quality. Much of the ambiance of the period would have been lost without a writer of his talent....

[aiontay]

I don't forget those Santee and Sisseston folks Lincoln exectued either. A bunch of them were innocent, and went to the gallows singing hymns.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Fredrick Douglass was clearly a very great and wise man, both generous of spirit as well as insightful.

What a sorry contrast our modern leaders and speakers make to either of these men.

[markg]

Think of the intelligence and eloquence of Lincoln and Douglass and then think of George Bush, and then try not to cry.

Re Lincoln's funny comments about miscegenation laws: I've often thought that one could say the same of those so fervently opposed these days to gay marriages-perhaps they want the gay marriage ban so badly in order to protect themselves from temptation.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01david.html?ex=1293771600&en=915bb03eb69cbb2d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 1, 2006

Cowboys Are My Weakness
By LARRY DAVID

SOMEBODY had to write this, and it might as well be me. I haven't seen "Brokeback Mountain," nor do I have any intention of seeing it. In fact, cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat, and even then I would make every effort to close my eyes and cover my ears.

And I love gay people. Hey, I've got gay acquaintances. Good acquaintances, who know they can call me anytime if they had my phone number. I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Is that so terrible? Does that mean I'm homophobic? And if I am, well, then that's too bad. Because you can call me any name you want, but I'm still not going to that movie.

To my surprise, I have some straight friends who've not only seen the movie but liked it. "One of the best love stories ever," one gushed. Another went on, "Oh, my God, you completely forget that it's two men. You in particular will love it."

"Why me?"

"You just will, trust me."

But I don't trust him. If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time? I'm a very susceptible person, easily influenced, a natural-born follower with no sales-resistance....

So who's to say I won't become enamored with the whole gay business? Let's face it, there is some appeal there. I know I've always gotten along great with men. I never once paced in my room rehearsing what to say before asking a guy if he wanted to go to the movies. And I generally don't pay for men, which of course is their most appealing attribute.

And gay guys always seem like they're having a great time. At the Christmas party I went to, they were the only ones who sang. Boy that looked like fun. I would love to sing, but this weighty, self-conscious heterosexuality I'm saddled with won't permit it.

I just know if I saw that movie, the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day. "You like those cowboys, don't you? They're kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they're cute. You can't fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You're gay! You're gay!"

Not that there's anything wrong with it.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/opinion/01pinera.html?ex=1259643600&en=be72ab1c6fc3ab15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

December 1, 2004

Retiring in Chile
By JOSÉ PIÑERA

Santiago, Chile — During his visit here last month, President Bush pointed out that the Chilean pension model was a "great example" for Social Security reform in the United States.

For 24 years, I have championed the Chilean retirement system, which is based on ownership, choice and personal responsibility. Having discussed our reforms with Mr. Bush as long ago as 1997 when he was governor of Texas, and having spoken at the White House Summit on Social Security in 1998 during the Clinton administration, I believe there is now an opportunity for a bipartisan agreement in the United States in this crucial area of public policy.

The Chilean retirement system was originally based on exactly the same principle that guides the United States' system. It originated in 19th century Prussia, where Bismarck created a pay-as-you-go-system. But such a defined-benefit system is not only hostage to demographic trends, it also has a fatal flaw: it destroys the link between individual contributions and benefits, or, in other words, between personal effort and reward.

Chile's Social Security Reform Act of 1980 allowed current workers to opt out of the government-run pension system financed by a payroll tax and instead contribute to a personal retirement account. What determines those workers' retirement benefit is the amount of money accumulated in their personal account during their working years. Neither the workers nor the employers pay a payroll tax. Nor do these workers collect a government-financed benefit.

Instead, 10 percent of their pretax wage is deposited monthly into a personal account. Workers may voluntarily contribute up to an additional 10 percent a month in pretax wages. The invested amounts grow tax-free, and the workers pay tax on this money only when they withdraw it for retirement.

Upon retiring, workers may choose from three payout options: purchase a family annuity from a life insurance company, indexed to inflation; leave their funds in the personal account and make monthly withdrawals, subject to limits based on life expectancy (if a worker dies, the remaining funds form a part of his estate); or any combination of the previous two. In all cases, if the money exceeds the amount needed to provide a monthly benefit equal to 70 percent of the workers' most recent wages, then the workers can withdraw the surplus as a lump sum.

A worker who has reached retirement age and has contributed for at least 20 years but whose accumulated fund is not enough to provide a "minimum pension," as defined by law, receives that amount from the government once funds in the personal account have been depleted....

[anne]

http://cep.cl/Cenda/Cen_Documentos/Pub_MR/Articulos/Varios/Pensiones_USA_1.html

December, 2004

Private Pensions in Chile, a Quarter Century On
By Manuel Riesco

In Chile today there is a wide consensus among experts that the Chilean private pension system will provide pensions on its own only to the upper income minority of the affiliates to the system. Even for them, it seems highly unsatisfactory, mainly because of the high fees charged by private pension administrators. These, in turn, are six companies that have become the most profitable Chilean industry, one that proved immune to the recent recession, as it reaped an average return on assets of over 50% a year from 1999 to 2003....

Recent studies by the State regulator of the private pension administrators, Superintendencia de Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (AFP) have concluded that over half of the affiliates to the new system will never be able to save enough in their pension accounts at retirement, to fund even the "minimum pension," which is set presently in the order of 100 US dollars a month....

All of the above studies agree as well that the State guarantee of "minimum pension" is almost completely ineffective, because very few affiliates in need of that guarantee will comply with its pre requisite of 20 years contributions into the system. On the other hand, most affiliates do not apply for the non-contributive "assistance pension" offered by the State, which presently amounts to about 50 US dollars a month, because it is subject to quotas, and targeted to the extremely poor. The above leaves most of the Chilean workforce with no entitlement at all regarding pensions—except withdrawing the meager funds accumulated in their individual pension accounts....

[anne]

Dear Brad, forgive the Chilean public-private pension posts made on the wrong thread. This thread on Douglass, Lincoln and Douglas is as usual superb.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

Lincoln's crack about people not rushing to marry "negroes" if there were no law against it reminds me: are we entitled to believe that Rick Santorum would bugger and/or screw cattle, geese, cats, dogs, whatever, if not prevented by law?

My partner being African, the implication seems clear.

[Marie Howell]

Has anyone seen the commercial, touting "Black History Month" [where is Irish History month, etc.?] that states that Lincoln and Frederick Douglas were friends?
Can you tell me the sponsor of this commercial? Can you tell me where such information is to be obtained? I can find nothing that corroborates this - if "history" is taught, it should be fact - not fiction....

[anne]

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=39

April 14, 1876

Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln
By Frederick Douglass

Delivered at the Unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.

Friends and Fellow-Citizens:

I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.

I congratulate you, also, upon the very favorable circumstances in which we meet today. They are high, inspiring, and uncommon. They lend grace, glory, and significance to the object for which we have met. Nowhere else in this great country, with its uncounted towns and cities, unlimited wealth, and immeasurable territory extending from sea to sea, could conditions be found more favorable to the success of this occasion than here.

We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act--an act which is to go into history; and we are here where every pulsation of the national heart can be heard, felt, and reciprocated. A thousand wires, fed with thought and winged with lightning, put us in instantaneous communication with the loyal and true men all over the country.

Few facts could better illustrate the vast and wonderful change which has taken place in our condition as a people than the fact of our assembling here for the purpose we have today. Harmless, beautiful, proper, and praiseworthy as this demonstration is, I cannot forget that no such demonstration would have been tolerated here twenty years ago. The spirit of slavery and barbarism, which still lingers to blight and destroy in some dark and distant parts of our country, would have made our assembling here the signal and excuse for opening upon us all the flood-gates of wrath and violence. That we are here in peace today is a compliment and a credit to American civilization, and a prophecy of still greater national enlightenment and progress in the future....

[anne]

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=39

Frederick Douglass

Any man can say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounce in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him, and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterance obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the South was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go....

[anne]

Yes; Frederick Douglass was adviser and friend to Abraham Lincoln. Yes; I can be Irish and grateful for "Black History Month." Yes; I am glad you noticed that Douglass and Lincoln were "close." Yes; they both need to be specially remembered. Yes; thank you for reminding us.

[anne]

Yes; history should be taught and should be well taught and we should spend time thinking of our racial history, and we might not have thought as much as we should about it were it not for your reminding us to find whether Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass could possibly have been friends as you were reminded and immediately doubted but were kind enough to ask us about so that we might assure you it was so. Yes; thank you for reminding me of that remembrance which we may all read and consider. Yes; even in Irishness, I am thankful for "Black History Month" and am pleased that you are.

[Kyla]

I need help on info of Stephen douglas For my history project!!! Every Web site I go to tells me Squat! The kind of info i need is personality so if anyone knows e-mail me the site plz and thanx!

_-kyla-_