[Peace-discuss] young Lincoln on R3volution --

[C. G. Estabrook]

  *Lincoln myth <=> myth of the Civil War as necessary to "free the slaves"*

They stand or fall together. The War was of course no more necessary than any 
other war; moreover the freedom achieved by American slaves after 1865 was the 
freedom of share-cropping or wage-slavery, at best.

Thoughtful Republicans in the late 19th century knew that their opposition to 
chattel slavery entailed opposition to wage-slavery.  That's one of the reasons 
that American labor history is so bloody: it was a continuation of the Civil 
War, as a stage in the discipline of labor.

Matters came to a climax in the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, 
which both put down labor (notably in the destruction of the Wobblies) and 
segregated society along racial lines, a racially-divided working class being 
less of a threat to the owners.  The Palmer Raids moved to shut up dangerous 
people who were pointing these things out.  --CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> Lincoln said this.  The question is if he rejected it or carried it out 
> on a grand scale.
> 
> 
> Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right 
> to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one 
> that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a 
> right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this 
> right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing 
> government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that 
> can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as 
> they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people 
> may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near 
> about them, who may oppose this movement. Such minority was precisely 
> the case of the Tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of 
> revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both, 
> and make new ones.
> 
> 
> 
> Abraham Lincoln
> 
> January 12, 1848.
> 
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