Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. 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. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. 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. 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. …I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose. 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. We are at best only his stepchildren children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude.
SOUTH PARK MR PRESIDENT FREE SPEECH FULL
Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preeminence in this worship at once full and supreme. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. 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. 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. 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. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans.
He was 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 of this country.
He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, 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 a white man.įrederick Douglass delivered this speech in April 1876 at the dedication of the first memorial for Abraham Lincoln in the District of Columbia –a monument to his role in emancipation paid for by contributions from ex-slaves. Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.
0 kommentar(er)
