TO THE EDITOR:
The Lincoln mythology, disguised as history, has filled many volumes since the end of the War Between the States. Its sole theme is to say that the purpose of the invasion of the Southern States was to free the slaves.
Woodrow Wilson saw through the political spin: “It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery.”
If you prefer not to believe Woodrow Wilson, check out Lincoln’s own words in his letter to Horace Greeley, dated August 22, 1862.
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
It doesn’t seem to say the war was to end slavery. It seems to say his war was to prevent Southern independence.
A year later he wrote the Gettysburg Address which is more rhetorical than logical.
In 1920, H. L. Mencken said of the Gettysburg Address:
“It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country — and for nearly twenty years that veto was so efficient that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”
