The book Forced Into Glory explains that Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves. The New York Times has access to Chapter 1 of this important book:
Since that time, the mythology of "the great emancipator" has become a part of the mental landscape of America. Generations of schoolchildren have memorized its cadences. Poets, politicians, and long-suffering Blacks have wept over its imagery and drama.Here's a C-Span interview with the author. The crux of the issue is this concerning dishonest Abe:
No other American story is so enduring.
No other American story is so comforting.
No other American story is so false.
Abraham Lincoln was not "the great emancipator."
The testimony of sixteen thousand books and monographs to the contrary notwithstanding, Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves, greatly or otherwise. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not a real emancipation proclamation at all, and did not liberate African-American slaves. John F. Hume, the Missouri antislavery leader who heard Lincoln speak in Alton and who looked him in the eye in the White House, said the Proclamation "did not ... whatever it may have otherwise accomplished at the time it was issued, liberate a single slave"
In what some critics call a hoax and others call a deliberate ploy not to free African-Americans but to keep them in slavery, Lincoln deliberately drafted the document so it wouldn't free a single Negro immediately.We encourage all Newsalert readers to read this book. Who was a bigger racist Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis , you decide.
What Lincoln did—and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe—was to "free" slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn't free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them.
